I've spent a lot of time in cemeteries over the years, and not because I'm hunting vampires or hoping to get a front row seat for the apparently inevitable zombie apocalypse. It's because I believe that if you really want to understand someone's life, it helps to know where they were born, where they died and every detail you can dig up about their everyday circumstances and the milestones they achieved.

There is a lot you can learn from gravestones. Dates of birth and death are almost always present and, since they were inscribed at the time of the person's death, they can sometimes be more accurate than information in records found online. Where a grave is located can also tell you a lot. Often people are buried with or near other family members. There can also be poems or sayings inscribed on the stones that can give you insights into their personalities or beliefs.

That brings us to Green Bay United Church Cemetery, which is located on Bidwell Road in the Manitoulin Island community of Sheguiandah. Family lore says Eleanor Bryan is buried here and I wanted to visit her grave to see what had been inscribed on the headstone. I was particularly interested in the date of her death since that key bit of information is absent from available records. She must have died at some point, but where and when is a bit of a mystery. I found one reference to her dying in 1902 at the age of 68, but the source was a bit dodgy. If I could find her grave, I could potentially verify the accuracy of that information. And yet, I couldn't find Eleanor's grave despite several sweeps of the cemetery.

I did, however, find the Skippen section of graveyard, which is where Eleanor would most likely be buried. Eleanor's daughter Harriet (Hattie) Bryan Skippen is buried there. She died in 1946 at the age of 95. Like so many women in my family, she lived a long life. Also buried in this section is Hattie's husband, William, who died in 1886 at the age of 41. Like so many of the men in my family, he died young. Both were born in Garafraxa, Ontario, which is where they met. Harriet came to the island with William and his family a few years prior to the arrival of her parents and younger siblings in 1874. Hattie would go on to live the remainder of her adult life on a nearby homestead.

Also found in the Skippen section of Green Bay United Church Cemetery is Eleanor's son-in-law, Frank Skippen, who died in Little Current in 1892 at the age of 35. Frank was married to Eleanor's daughter Annie, who would later migrate south to the Niagara peninsula and would die in Welland, Ontario in 1968 at the age of 103. Frank was also born in Garafraxa where he and Annie would have met as children. He moved to Manitoulin with his brother William and the rest of the family in the late 1860s. When Annie reached adulthood, they married.

It makes sense that Eleanor Bryan would be buried in this cemetery. Following the murder of her husband and son in 1877, she lived for many years with both Annie and Hattie. When Green Bay United Church was erected in 1892, it most likely became the spiritual home of Annie, Hattie, and Eleanor.

It's possible that Eleanor's grave is located in this cemetery but the headstone is no longer visible, either because it was damaged and ultimately destroyed by time and weather, the grave is marked by a plaque embedded in the ground that the grass has since over grown or, possibly, the headstone is still there, but has been obscured by a massive lilac bush that dominates this section of the cemetery. Peering through the lilac branches, it did appear as though there could be some of headstones entombed by the shrub but there was no real way to access them.

So the mystery of Eleanor's final resting place endures. Its presence in the Green Bay United Church Cemetery has been alluded to by several sources so I'm somewhat confident that it's there. Finding it is another matter.