Film on Aurora pet cemetery receives prestigious international award

A documentary film about the restoration efforts at the historic pet cemetery in Aurora, produced in conjunction with the Aurora Museum & Archives, has won a prestigious Telly Award, which honours excellence in video and television. Annually, the Telly Awards receives more than 12,000 entries globally in its various categories.

The film, Happy Woodland Pet Cemetery: Uncovering History, won Gold in the Museums & Galleries – Non- Broadcast category and was directed and produced by Tracey and Tom Strnad of The Blue Mountains based Mountain Goat Film Company. Michelle Johnson and Jeremy Hood, Aurora Museum & Archives staff members, feature prominently in the film and collaborated on the vision and script.

“I’m absolutely thrilled that this documentary has received recognition on the global stage,” said Aurora Mayor Tom Mrakas. “The pet cemetery here in Aurora is truly one of the most unique parts of our history, and we’ve long been working on a way to preserve and showcase its fascinating story. This film beautifully captures some of the really creative work that our team at the Museum and Archives is undertaking to make that a reality.”

The Happy Woodland Pet Cemetery, believed to be the first pet cemetery in Canada, was originally operated by Victor Blochin and Anne Wilson who purchased the property on Yonge Street in the late 1920s. In 1934, an official dedication ceremony was held with more than 100 people in attendance. It soon became a popular destination for people to honour their deceased pets, with pet owners from across Canada sending the remains of their animals to be buried there.

However, in the late 1970s the property was sold, and for decades upkeep at the cemetery was neglected, and its rich history slowly became local lore. That all changed in 2011 when the Town acquired the property, and over the last few years, the Museum and Archives, with help from dedicated community members, archaeologists, and other technical experts, have been working to bring it back to life. The cemetery currently remains closed, but the hope is that one day soon it will reopen to the public.

Much of this painstaking and detailed work is captured in the film, including cataloguing the burial sites of more than 800 named pets on the property, unearthing headstones that were displaced from their original locations, and using archival footage and photos, as well as ground-penetrating radar, to determine the original boundary of the cemetery. Informing all of this work is building upon the cemetery’s current designation under the Ontario Heritage Act to potentially be designated as a national historic site.

“We’re not just restoring a pet cemetery, but also telling a really important story about the lives of people from the 1930s all the way into the 1970s, and the strong connection they had to this very special place,” said Johnson, who is the Collections and Exhibitions Coordinator at the Museum and Archives. “And with Happy Woodland likely being the first pet cemetery in Canada, we feel a great responsibility to restore this incredibly unique place as best we can to its original form.”