The northwest corner of the Regina cemetery looks nearly abandoned. The Potter’s Field area only has around a dozen head stones, but nearly 100 people are buried there.
“A lot of them are forgotten by history, a lot of them are buried without markers,” said local travel blogger Kenton de Jong.
The people are victims of the Spanish flu. It came into the country from soldiers returning from the First World War in 1918, killing millions of people around the world between 1918 and 1920.
“I was amazed by how many people died from it,” de Jong said.
According to de Jong’s research, Saskatchewan lost 5,018 people to the disease, including 330 people in Regina. The city struggled to keep up with the rate of deaths, and many graves were left without markers.
“As time goes by, we seem to be losing lots of our heritage, lots of our history,” de Jong said. “This is something that we’ve kind of forgotten over the past century, and I think it’s important that we bring it back and remember these people now.”
De Jong has set up a GoFundMe page for the memorial and wants to raise about $5,000 to make a general gravestone for the people with unmarked graves.
“A lot of them have been lost to history,” he said.
De Jong’s next step is to talk to the city about the memorial, and his plans to start his own walking tours through the cemetery. He wants to highlight historical areas, including the people who died in the Regina Cyclone and the Regina Riots.
The City of Regina says he will need permission to start the tours since the cemetery is city property. In a statement, the city says it is open to discussing plans for the memorial with de Jong.
“This is some great history, some great stories of Regina citizens that I would love to remind people about,” he said.
