A brief and incomplete history of Winnipeg as told by its cemeteries.

When I was very young I had a fascination with cemeteries. We would drive out to see my grandma in rural Manitoba and I would insist that we stop at a cemetery that I knew was along the way to look at graves. I was a creepy, weird kid.

I grew out of that obsession with the dead and any lingering creepiness was quickly quashed in medical school. The only autopsy I saw was one of the more unpleasant things I have ever experienced. It was a biker who was hit by a truck and had been pancaked across the side of a road. I got pretty woozy, pretty quickly. Being able to see the pulped insides of a former person is not a great sales pitch for going into pathology but on the other hand a pathologists patients can't talk back to them. Even though  the deceased may be silent, the dead do tell tales (contrary to what a pirate might say), and they can be pretty interesting ones.

The city of Winnipeg curates an open data set with all burials that have occurred in city of Winnipeg cemeteries going back to the 1880s. This data set includes about 116,000 burials in four separate cemeteries. The ostensible reason is for Winnipegers to be able to search their family members for genealogies and I can spot some people who look like they might be in my family tree. But in aggregate this burial record tells a little bit of the history of the city of Winnipeg since 1900. If you look closely you can also pick out events and trends that were affecting not just the city but the world as well.

Here's the aggregate burial time series. Its not standardized for population or anything like that. Its just a straight number of burials on a monthly basis.

The first three recorded burials occurred in October 1878 and they were all infants. Winnipeg continued to record a small number of burials in the period between 1880 and 1905 but the real explosion in burials begins around 1906. This rapid climb in burials correlates to a time when Winnipeg was considered a hip happening place. Due to its strategic location as a gateway to the rest of western North America the population exploded from 4000 people in 1879 to 160,000 people in 1916. The tail end of this boom is apparent in the cemetery data with the rapid climb in deaths from 1906 to 1914. Burials were increasing because so many more people were immigrating to Winnipeg.

It was at this time when Winnipeg was a booming metropolis. Anything that needed to be transported to western Canada went through the railroad in Winnipeg and the rail-yards in Winnipeg were the largest in the Commonwealth reflecting its status as a massive transportation hub. The city was known as the "breadbasket" for the British empire due to its humongous farming exports. Property in downtown Winnipeg was worth as much as downtown Chicago and the largest bank vault in the world at the time was built in Winnipeg. Charlie Chaplin came to perform and Union Station in downtown Winnipeg was designed by the same architects as those that designed Grand Central Station in New York.

It was also during this era when Winnipeg was essentially known as the Las Vegas of Canada. With this massive wave of immigration came prostitution, gambling, and lots of alcohol. This activity mainly centered around the neighbourhood of Douglas Point which continues to be an area of ill repute today. More than 50 brothels were sandwiched into this area, the unofficial red light district of Winnipeg. Public intoxication and prostitution topped the list of arrests in the city around this time.

With this massive influx of people came slums which were crammed full of recent immigrant families. In one neighborhood survey there were 120 families in 41 houses. Because of overcrowding and otherwise unsanitary conditions infant mortality in the North End of Winnipeg where most of these new-comers settled was double the rate in the more affluent portions of the city. The current rate of infant mortality in Canada is about 5 deaths per 1000 births. In the North end, at the turn of the century, it was about 250 deaths per 1000 births.

Then in 1914 everything went sideways for Winnipeg when the Panama canal was completed. This allowed anyone who wanted to ship goods to the west coast to shave weeks off of the trip and led to the cities decline. Of note in the time series around this period is the giant spike of over 300 burials in December of 1918. This is the second wave of the Spanish influenza, brought back by soldiers returning from World War I, clobbering Winnipeg.

The stagnation in economic activity and burials continued through the 1920s. Then the Great Depression hit the western World in the 1930s exacerbating Winnipeg's slide. Winnipeg's unemployment rate was the second highest in Canada and rather than pay out unemployment relief benefits, the city council elected to deport immigrants who were unemployed.  Reflecting this in the data is a slow decrease in burials as people left and the cities growth stalled during the period of 1914 to 1935.

This was the trend until World War II when, as young men returned from military service, and started to have families the burial rate flips and begins to climb again. The burial number in Winnipeg then stabilized likely as a result of several factors including younger demographics, improvements in medicine, and slowish population growth.

This is by no means a complete history of Winnipeg but, lets face it, all of the cool stuff in Winnipeg happened before the 1950s. This history lesson of Winnipeg is brought to you by several sources but the one that is by far the most interesting and readable (and the one I steal the most liberally from) is a Free Press article series on the architecture and history of Winnipeg - found here, you should read it.

But the burial records also show a couple of interesting things for certain subgroups of people who died and were subsequently buried in Winnipeg. In particular, we can track infant deaths and military deaths in Winnipeg for the last century and these patterns are reflective of world-wide events. 

Take infants for example. We can identify a lot of them in the burial data because many were unnamed when they were buried. It's likely that these are neonates who died very soon after birth as their first names are just recorded as infant or baby or some derivation of those two terms. Infant deaths in Winnipeg peaked in 1918 with the Spanish Flu and then declined to almost nothing by the 1970s. Over the last century there were huge investments made in public health and medicine in order to prevent infant deaths and this trend is evident in Winnipeg cemeteries. 

As an aside, I also think this measured decline in infant burials might have come as a result of declining fertility over the century. There's only so many good names that you can give to your kids and if one of them dies that's one less name you can use for the next one. This doesn't matter when you only have two kids but it does when you have ten and three of them die and your last kid is stuck with the name Cletus. With smaller families, even if your kids dies, you can still name them and not be too worried about running out of good names (if I'm thinking about this correctly the marginal value of a name increases with each kid). This could have only happened with families having one or two kids which is the way things were going by the 1970s. Just a thought.

Military vets are another group we can pick out of the data because they're buried in special sections of Winnipeg cemeteries.

These military burials peak in about the mid 1950s which is about the time when the main cohort of World War I vets hit their 60s and early 70s. This is about the life expectancy of a male born at the time. The number of veteran deaths tails off until about the 1990s when a second, smaller peak occurs. This coincides with a time when the cohort of World War II vets hit their 60s and 70s and likely starts to die off.

Finally, a group of burials that I have a small direct connection with (I didn't kill them if that's what you're thinking). Below is a time series of the number of people who have been buried in a special plot reserved for persons who have donated their bodies to medical science.

One of the more essential parts of an undergraduate medical education is having human cadavers to learn anatomy from. Dissections have a long history that goes back to Greek and Roman physicians like Galen and Herophilos but unlike today these cadavers were usually the "donated" bodies of executed criminals. At the end of the Roman empire, the dissection of human bodies was prohibited which made it very difficult for any anatomical research or education to occur. Often physicians would steal bodies and dissect them illegally and in secret. This prohibition continued until the Renaissance when, once again, dissection was allowed on executed criminals in England. This supply of cadavers was often not enough to meet demand which led to further grave-raiding by physicians.

Today the supply of cadavers for anatomy education is provided by generous donors who volunteer their bodies after death. The donation program for the University of Manitoba began in 1932 and in 1952 it was thought that the donors should be recognized for their significant contribution to medical education and science. The University of Manitoba was the first university in Canada to do so. A monument exists for these people and every year a burial ceremony occurs where donor families and medical students are invited to celebrate their contribution. I went in 2012 and it was a very beautiful ceremony for a group of very giving patients.