REACH NB is also contributing to a project developing Black Canadian History for schools in the country.
MOUNTAIN HOME CEMETERY MARY LOU SOFTWARE
The group, she said, has applied for grants to buy software that will allow for the mapping of New Brunswick, locating forgotten historical Black towns, churches, schools and cemeteries. McCarthy-Brandt chairs a new organization, REACH NB (Remembering Each African Cemeteries History in New Brunswick), which is collaborating with the provincial archives to locate and document forgotten and abandoned gravesites and tell their stories and histories. “What we want is a public apology for my ancestors and I have started e-mailing politicians looking for that.” “When the water level raised after the dam became operable, those graves were sunk almost 200 feet under water,” the New Brunswick Black History Society first female Black president said. She also advocated for a new memorial stone at the Kingsclear Kilburn Community Cemetery where the graves of nearly 70 Blacks were not relocated when the Mactaquac Dam was built in the 1960s. In the small rural community of Keswick Ridge, she tends to a graveyard that is the final resting place for many Black Loyalists and her ancestors. They were not given the same respect as the White graves.” In some cases, Blacks were placed at the end of cemeteries in hills and the wards going down a mountain. “In our cemeteries here, a lot of Blacks and other visible minorities were all kept at cemeteries’ borders. “I have always felt our elders need to be respected both in life and death,” McCarthy-Brandt said.
The thesis, ‘Segregated in Life and Death: A Black Woman’s Critical Exploration and Narrative Account of Early African Descended Communities and Graveyards in New Brunswick’, was successfully defended in December 2020. Black graveyards were a major part of Mary Louise McCarthy-Brandt studies when she decided to do her PhD.
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