When family is long gone, who takes care of Eastern Townships cemeteries?

You can find them alongside country roads all across Quebec's Eastern Townships: small family cemeteries with crooked white stones engraved with the names and dates of some of the region's earliest European and Loyalist settlers.

In some cases, the markers have birth dates reaching back to the 1700s. Many have outlasted the hamlets and homesteads that erected them in the first place, and the families who would have looked after them have either moved away or died out.

For Heather Darch, the question of who should care for these old stones now is a major concern.

"I do my best to be an advocate for protecting the small sites and cemetery stones that exist across the Eastern Townships in Missisquoi County in particular," said Darch, a project director for the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) and the former curator of the Missisquoi Museum, about an hour southeast of Montreal.

The museum and its associated historical society have been helping with the care and oversight for a number of heritage cemetery sites in the surrounding area. But the task is a large one.

Standing amid the graves at the Stanton Cemetery in Stanbridge East, the cemetery enthusiast said that the passage of time has been more kind to some small private cemeteries than others as plots of land have changed hands.

"The family disappeared then the site is just there. It's on someone's land," Darch said. "As land has changed ownership over the decades, you may have someone who doesn't care about a site and others who are quite fascinated by them."

This is part of the reason why the Missisquoi Historical Society has taken on the cause of cemetery care, but that work is complicated by the fact that the society depends on the goodwill and co-operation of landowners.

Darch said Quebec's laws regarding cemeteries are complex and often confusing, particularly when it comes to sites that are no longer being actively used for burials.

Josée Villeneuve, president of the Association des Archéologues du Québec, says that even the oldest cemeteries are rarely considered heritage sites from an archeological point of view.

Bones are always considered human remains and not artifacts. Although the provincial Culture Ministry does require an archeological consultation when bones are found, the remains are the responsibility of a different ministry.

In a written statement, a representative of the Culture Ministry explained that cemeteries, even very old ones, are governed by the Health Ministry through the province's Funeral Operations Act.

That law outlines the rules around the handling of human remains, but it says nothing about the monuments and markers that are at the heart of what people like Darch are trying to preserve.

"You're not supposed to touch bones and the remains of anyone, but there's a very lax protection on above-ground monuments. So you have places where people come in and they remove stones or farmers have plowed the stones under," she said.

Recognizing the challenges that come with trying to preserve sites that fall into a sort of legal grey area, Darch is working to share the stories of the cemeteries and the people in them.

"It's wonderful to walk through and find names, take photographs of stones and find the story behind the stone," she said.