Ancestry adds Vancouver, British Columbia, Mountain View Cemetery Index, 1887-2007 and "death takes a holiday"

Ancestry.ca now facilities searching index entries for Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery, 1887-2007. Located west of Fraser St, between 31st Ave and 43rd Ave it's made up of 106 acres of land with approximately 92,000 grave sites and 145,000 interred remains. Background information is at http://vancouver.ca/your-government/mountain-view-cemetery.aspx

 

Searching is by name and date of death with incomplete information acceptable.

The original database can also be searched through the iCemetery app for iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, where you can also zoom in on a map to pinpoint the grave site.

 

The exact number of people in the database is 139,892, so with 365.25 days per year the average number for deaths for a given day, irrespective of year, should be 383. You sometimes hear of the "death takes a holiday" effect where people postpone their death until after a holiday. What's the evidence from this Vancouver database?

 

22 Dec 402

23 Dec 446

24 Dec 372

25 Dec 304

26 Dec 286

27 Dec 347

28 Dec 382

29 Dec 469

30 Dec 474

31 Dec 989

1 Jan 502

2 Jan 405

3 Jan 416

 

The data looks suspicious. Looking at the database on the iPhone many entries have either a death or interment date, not both. I suspect Ancestry may have sometimes mistakenly entered the interment date in their database in place of the death date. Beware.