Sisters of Charity Burials, Mount Olivet Cemetery, Halifax
- Colby Gaudet
- May 6
- 7 min read
Updated: May 7
In my recent research pursuit of Sister Mary Bernard (1852–1937), who I discussed in my last post, I learned that she was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery, here in Halifax. From her death certificate, I had also learned that she died at Mount Saint Vincent, the motherhouse of her religious order, the Sisters of Charity of Halifax (SCH), located in the Rockingham neighbourhood on the Bedford Basin. As an exercise in fieldwork, I decided to visit Sister Bernard’s grave. I wasn’t sure precisely where her grave was located in the cemetery, but upon arriving I saw in the distance, at one end, two rows of white crosses which looked very distinct from the otherwise typical granite headstones that filled the rest of the cemetery. So, I wandered toward the white crosses and soon realized that not only was Sister Bernard buried there, but so were several dozen other Sisters of Charity.
Mount Olivet is a Roman Catholic cemetery, opened in 1896 in a Halifax suburb, and is most well-known for containing some graves of victims of the sinking of the Titanic and the Halifax Explosion. I hadn’t realized that the cemetery had, for a time, also served as a burial ground for the SCH. I noted that the dates of the SCH burials ranged from 1935 to 1953.
Looking anxiously for Sister Bernard, I walked between the two rows, glancing over the names embossed on the painted metal crosses. Some of the markers were rusted slightly, with faded paint, or growing patches of lichen. Otherwise, all the crosses were identical; some leaning from years of winter frosts.
I soon found the cross marked with the name of the nun I was looking for near the end of the second row. As I was reading the names, I also realized that Sister Bernard wasn’t the only Acadian nun buried there. I found myself reading mostly a combination of Irish and Acadian surnames that were appended to the sisters’ devotional names. For instance, Sister Bernard was identified on her grave-marker as “Sister Mary Bernard Stuart” (her baptismal name was Anne Amelia Stuart). While Sister Bernard’s father was Irish, her mother was an Acadian, Marguerite-Sophie Melanson, from Church Point in Clare, Nova Scotia. Other crosses were marked with readily recognizable Acadian surnames: Doucet, LeBlanc, Robichaud, d’Entremont, Gaudet, Dugas. These appeared alongside Irish names such as Slattery, Donovan, Brophy, Connors, Ryan. Of a total of ninety-eight SCH graves, there were fourteen with Acadian names. It’s possible there are others, such as Stuart, who had both Irish and Acadian parents.
I was able to gather some demographic insights from my cemetery visit. I noted the names of the Acadian sisters as I wanted to see if I could locate their death certificates and thereby ascertain their parents’ names and communities of origin. I was able to locate all the sisters’ death certificates which showed that the fourteen Acadian nuns were born between 1852 (this being Sister Bernard, the oldest of the group) and 1898. They all came from Acadian communities in southwestern Nova Scotia, except three: one came from New Brunswick, one from Cape Breton, and another from Prince Edward Island. Minus these three exceptions, the Acadian nuns represented the two districts in the southern part of Nova Scotia where the SCH had operated schools since the 1860s and ‘70s.[1] These nuns – especially the seven born in the 1850s and ‘60s – would thus have represented the first Acadian members of the SCH from the Clare and Argyle districts. They would have been educated as girls by the SCH and later joined the congregation. They hailed from communities such as Church Point, Meteghan, Belleville, Eel Brook, Abrams River, and West Pubnico. Not all the sisters died at Mount Saint Vincent, as did Sister Bernard; some died at Saint Mary’s Convent on Barrington Street in Halifax.
While I’ve recently published an article in the journal Church History about the religious lives of Acadian laywomen in the early nineteenth century, I haven't yet undertaken focused research about the women from these Acadian communities in the later part of the century who became professed nuns. It wasn't until later in the century – by the 1870s or so, once convent schools were established in Clare and Argyle – that the first women from these communities would take religious vows with the SCH. While my current book project has preoccupied me with the early nineteenth century, this topic of Acadian members of the SCH is an interest that I hope to pursue further in future research.
My reconnaissance in the cemetery has unexpectedly helped me begin to sketch a picture of some of the first Acadian Sisters of Charity in Nova Scotia. While other congregations – especially francophone sisterhoods from Quebec – were established in other Acadian communities in New Brunswick and Cape Breton, the SCH (which originated in New York City before coming to Halifax) predominated in the Acadian districts of Clare and Argyle, as well as other Roman Catholic communities of mostly Irish and Scottish extraction in eastern Nova Scotia. Little historiographic work has been done on the Acadian members of the SCH.[2]
While I walked along the rows of crosses marking the nuns' graves, another question tugged at my thoughts – a more unsettling question deeply tied to my interest in the history of religion in Canada. As I was looking there, at the graves of Roman Catholic nuns from the early to mid twentieth century, I couldn't help but also think of the graves – marked and unmarked – of Mi'kmaw children who were the forced students of the SCH. It remains to be seen if any of the Sisters of Charity buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery worked at the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, established and operated by the Halifax Archdiocese and the SCH, starting in 1929 and running until 1967.[3] It’s entirely possible some of the later sisters buried at Mount Olivet worked at the Shubenacadie residential school or the congregation’s on-reserve day school at Indian Brook (as identified in the SCH centennial history).[4] The death certificates of six of the Acadian sisters listed their occupations as either “teacher,” “school teacher,” or "music teacher" – but didn't stipulate where they had been teachers. Occupations of the other sisters were listed generically as “religious duties,” or, in one case, a “seamstress.” As with my study of the Grey Nuns of Montreal and their involvement with Indian Residential Schools in the Canadian Northwest[5], it is clear that many Catholic nuns in Canada worked for a time at residential schools as part of their career training that took them, over the years, from school to school or institution to institution within their congregational networks. I will need to plan further research into the biographies of these women in the congregational archives. But as I noted in my last post, much of the SCH archives was destroyed by a fire at their motherhouse in 1951. As it stands, I’ve gathered these insights primarily from my cemetery visit and by referring to the provincial vital statistics. From a preliminary look at the records of the federal Department of Indian Affairs, I can see that these collections also contain archival material relevant to SCH networks.
More to come.
The Acadian Sisters of Charity buried at Mount Olivet (arranged chronologically by date of death):
Sister Jean Eudes d’Entremont, d. 9 Sep 1937 (b. 12 Feb 1888, West Pubnico, NS)
Sister Mary Bernard Stuart, d. 27 Nov 1937 (b. 5 Aug 1852, Church Point, NS)
Sister Mary Ludovica Doucet, d. 11 Jul 1943 (b. 11 Feb 1855, Ste. Anne/Fredericton, NB)
Sister Marie Christine LeBlanc, d. 11 Dec 1943 (b. 26 Jul 1898, Abrams River, NS)
Sister Mary Eugenia LeBlanc, d. 25 Sep 1944 (b. 8 Sep 1875, Meteghan, NS)
Sister Mary Alexis d’Entremont, d. 17 Jun 1946 (b. 22 Oct 1861, West Pubnico, NS)
Sister Marianna Basil LeBlanc, d. 9 Jul 1947 (b. 1872, Margaree Harbour, NS)
Sister Mary Francisca Gaudet, d. 17 Feb 1948 (b. 1854, Tignish, PEI)
Sister Mary Hilary Doucet, d. 13 May 1949 (b. 11 Oct. 1882, Eel Brook, NS)
Sister Mary Antoine Deveau, d. 24 May 1950 (b. 15 Nov 1877, Meteghan, NS)
Sister Mary Monica Jacquard, d. 16 Nov 1950 (b. 12 Jul 1864, Belleville, NS)
Sister Marie Elise Robichaud, d. 17 Jan 1952 (b. 13 May 1878, Meteghan, NS)
Sister Mary Perpetua Dulong [originally Dulain], d. 1 Feb 1952 (b. 19 Sep 1862, Belleville, NS)
Sister Cecilia Mary Dugas, d. 30 Nov 1952 (b. 15 Aug 1869, Weymouth, NS)
[1] Mary Olga McKenna, “An Educational Odyssey: The Sisters of Charity of Halifax,” in Changing Habits: Women’s Religious Orders in Canada, ed. Elizabeth Smyth (Ottawa: Novalis, 2007), 73.
[2] Some scholarship exists about the Sisters of Charity of Saint John and the Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph in Tracadie, New Brunswick, see Florence Ott, “Les Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, enseignantes à l’Académie Sainte-Famille de Tracadie,” Études d’histoire religieuse 78, no. 1 (2012): 43–60; Neil Boucher, “Un exemple du nationalisme de l’Église de l’Acadie: les French Sisters chez les Sœurs de la Charité de Saint-Jean, 1914–1924,” Études d’histoire religieuse 60 (1994): 25–34. See also, Sheila Andrew, “Gender and Nationalism: Acadians, Québécois, and Irish in New Brunswick Nineteenth-Century Colleges and Convent Schools, 1854–1888,” CCHA Historical Studies 68 (2002): 7–23; and Robert Pichette, Les religieuses, pionnières en Acadie (Michel Henry, 1990).
[3] Martha Walls, “The TRC, Reconciliation, and the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School,” Acadiensis 50, no. 2 (Autumn 2021): 72–84; The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Vol. 4: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), esp. 87, 95–98, and 108–109. Isabelle Knockwood, a survivor of the Shubenacadie residential school, wrote about her and other survivors' interactions with the Sisters of Charity in a community memoir. See Isabelle Knockwood, Out of the Depths: The Experiences of Mi’kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, 4th ed. (Halifax: Fernwood, 2015 [1992]).
[4] Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1849–1949 (Archdiocese of Halifax, 1949).
[5] Colby Gaudet, "Exploring Concordia's Colonial Past: An Examination of the University's Past and Present Relationships with Indigenous Peoples" (Concordia University: Office of Indigenous Directions, forthcoming 2026).
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