Grieving Through Glass

Florence Irene Ford died in 1871 at age ten, and was buried in Natchez City Cemetery in Mississippi.

During her short life she was extremely frightened of storms and whenever one occurred she would rush to her mother to find comfort.

Upon her death her mother was so struck with grief that she had Florence's casket constructed with a glass window at the child's head. The grave was dug to provide an area, the same depth of the coffin, at the child's head, but this area had steps that would allow the mother to descend to her daughter's level so she could comfort Florence during storms. To shelter the mother during storms, hinged metal trap doors were installed over the area the mother would occupy while at her child's grave.

The glass window was walled off in the 1950s to prevent vandalism, but the metal doors still work. More photos here, here, and here.

The Mummy May Return

Janice sends news that DNA tests will be conducted on the famous mummy of Concord, N.H.

The testing could allow Charles Peavey to put the mummy, dubbed Baby John and believed to be about 90 years old, back in it[s] glass display case in the Peavey living room.

The mummy has been held at the state medical examiner's office in Concord since police confiscated it last year. Earlier this month a judge ordered Peavey to bury Baby John because there was no evidence that it was a member of the Peavey family. [Link]

Hmm, as long as it's a relative you can display a corpse in your living room? That's good to know.

In related news, 92-year-old Rita Rich has some theories about the identity of a mummified infant found under the floorboards of her childhood home in Toronto wrapped in a newspaper from 1925. She's quite sure it wasn't the child of her aunt Della, with whom she lived.

For one thing, Della was certain she could never become pregnant. If she had by some miracle become pregnant, she would have had no reason to hide the baby, says Rich.

Besides, Rich adds, except for a few weeks in summer when she went to visit relatives in the U.S., Rich was always with Della.

It would have been impossible for Della to carry a baby to term without Rich noticing.

Nor does she think the baby was her father's (he didn't date after her mother died), or the boarder's ("He was a perfect gentleman, and if he had gotten a girl pregnant, would have married her").

Rich thinks it's possible the baby may have belonged to Della's much younger sister, Alla Mae, a beautiful, blue-eyed blonde, who would have been in her early 30s in 1925. [Link]

The Boy in the Iron Coffin

Here's a great story of archaeological and genealogical detective work from the Washington Post. Smithsonian researchers have successfully identified a boy found buried in an iron coffin in Washington, D.C. He is William Taylor White, who died in 1852.

The identification was made after museum researchers, led by Deborah Hull-Walski and Randal Scott, figured out that the youth might be White, constructed a 788-person family tree -- a diagram that stretched the length of a wall -- and tracked down a descendant in Lancaster, Pa.

The descendant, Linda Dwyer, 64, a night clerk in a convenience store, agreed to provide a sample of her DNA, obtained via a mouth swab, and when that was compared with DNA taken from the boy's left shinbone, it matched.

She said elated Smithsonian researchers called her with the news, saying: "'It's you! It's you!'" [Link]

A Tomb With a View

When Timothy Clark Smith was buried in New Haven, Vermont, he had an exit strategy.

Beneath the odd, grassy mound of earth, Timothy's face was positioned beneath a cement tube that led to the surface. The 6 foot tube ended at a piece of 14x14 inch plate glass allowing Tim to gaze upward in the event that he was buried alive. A bell was placed in his hand just in case he needed to signal that he was still alive. Which brings forth the questions...who could hear a bell under 6 feet of earth anyway? If he were alive, how long would the oxygen last if and when someone came to his rescue?

[via Boing Boing]

A Clarification From Keith

Keith Richards has corrected that crazy story that he snorted his father's ashes "with a little bit of blow."

"The cocaine bit was rubbish. I said I chopped him up like cocaine, not with.

"What I found out is that ingesting your ancestors is a very respectable way of, you know, he went down a treat." [Link]

Glad he cleared that up.

Boneyard Bunk Beds

An impending shortage of burial space in England and Wales may lead to grave-sharing.

In a technique called "lift and deepen" old graves will be deepened with room for up to six new coffins to be placed on top of the older remains.

Families could refuse permission for their ancestors' graves to be re-used for "at least another generation".

But once the deeper graves have been used once there will be no time constraints on when subsequent bodies are buried in them. [Link]

A Few Last Requests

I learned yesterday that President Andrew Johnson was buried with his head resting on a copy of the Constitution. (I had to assure one of my nieces that, no, the president wasn't decapitated.) Here are some other unusual items people have carried to their graves.

• Just last April, a man in India was buried in the car he had owned since 1958.
• Reuben Smith was buried in 1899 sitting in his recliner with a checkerboard on his lap.
• Sir Walter Raleigh was buried with his favorite pipe and a tin of tobacco
• Bela Lugosi was buried in a black Dracula cape.
• Humphrey Bogart was buried with a small whistle inscribed, "If you need anything, just whistle."
• Bob Marley was buried with "his guitar, a soccer ball, a marijuana bud, a ring given to him by the Prince Asfa Wossen of Ethiopia and a Bible."
• Canadian Mountie Peter Schiemann was buried with a flashlight and bag of potato chips. ("He always said, 'If I was to die, bury me with a bag of chips and a flashlight because it's dark and I'll get hungry,'" said his sister, Julia Schiemann.)
• The guy in this commercial was buried with his lawn mower.

One Coffin, Slightly Used

Elaine Underwood has in her basement a coffin once owned by Col. McLane Tilton—a U.S. Marine who lived in the house and died in 1914.

Tilton used to store his clothes in the box and occasionally would entertain guests by getting in. According to a certificate written by Dennis Claude, the antiques dealer who held the coffin for so long, Tilton had "contracted with an old black man to bring his wagon, place him in it and bury him in St. Anne's Cemetery when he died.

"His children would have no part of this," the certificate says. [Link]

If You Can't Grow Older, You Might As Well Molder

I first blogged about Swedes freeze-drying corpses back in 2005, but Nancy Bovy has alerted me that it's back in the news.

Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh and her company Promessa have specialised in the freeze-drying method, and the company has applied for patents in 35 countries.

Promessa has promoted the idea of using the human remains, like compost, to feed plants and shrubs. [Link]

Wiigh's patent applications in the U.S. are titled "Method at mouldering" and "Method for treating organic matter to promote mouldering." The first includes this disconcerting passage:

[T]here is a belief that we shall return to earth, which is reflected in the expression "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" of the burial ceremony, which provides the basis for all our life philosophy. Facts show, however, that we do not return to earth but flow away in liquid state.

Corpses on Campus

More and more people are planning a posthumous return to college. But getting buried at one's alma mater is nothing new.

In the early 1800s, before embalming became widespread, it was often impractical to ship home the body of a student or professor.

Iowa State University's 131-year-old dead zone holds about 800 corpses, mostly faculty but also two students, a night watchman and his dog.

Notre Dame's sprawling burial ground debuted in 1843, one year after the school was founded, along with a mortuary that helped subsidize tuition costs. [Link]

One Way to Get Over Death

Double-decker burial plots are very popular at San Gorgonio Memorial Park in California.

JoAnne Gosen, assistant manager of the public cemetery, estimated at least 75 percent of the couples who reserve graves buy the double option, with the casket of the first to die buried deeply and the next on top. About the only restriction is that they share one grave marker.

Mostly, the double-grave occupants are married couples, but some are parents and children and even pairs of cousins. Gosen thinks there are probably friends who are not related at all buried together. [Link]

Crazy Coffins

Vic Fearn and Company have created some unusual coffins for their clientele, some of which may be seen on their oddly designed Crazy Coffins website.

The list includes kites, corkscrews, a ballet shoe, an electric guitar, a football boot, a sports bag and a replica of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.

Among the other designs waiting for their owner is a wooden egg, commissioned by a woman in Wales who wants to be buried upright in the foetal position. [Link]

Keeping the Family Close

Some Japanese who have moved to urban areas have found it hard to leave their rural pasts behind. So they're inviting their ancestors to join them.

Some of those interested in reburial note that they have no intention of returning to their countryside birthplaces after living in the city for more than 40 years.

Others comment that they want to take the burden off relatives who have had to care for their family graves. And then there is the expense; some pensioners simply cannot afford the cost of making an overnight trip to a countryside cemetery. [Link]

Boxed Like an Egyptian

I don't know how I missed this one. While moving graves in Tennessee last summer, Dan Allen stumbled upon an unusual casket.

Allen and other archaeologists found a pre-Civil War cast-iron coffin shaped like an Egyptian mummy while moving a cemetery for developers at a site on Whites Creek Pike in North Nashville.

“I've only seen three of these in my life,” Allen said. The headstone lay near the site. “It says her name was Mildred Casey, which was her maiden name,” Allen said. Casey was 54-years-old when she died in 1851. [Link]

Mummy Dearest

The New Hampshire mummy story has inspired the most watched video at CNN.com. Charles Peavey insists he is "not a freak," and I am inclined to believe him. Until I'm reminded that he cuddled a mummified baby and gave it a pet.

[tagged: genealogy, family tree, ancestry]

A Genealogist Who Loves His Mummy

Charles Peavey of Concord, New Hampshire, was distressed when the police came and took away his mummified baby last week. After all, it was part of the family.

Of all the stories surrounding the mummy's birth and death, Peavey favors the one that says he's an ancient relative - the stillborn son of a great-great uncle. He calls the mummy "Baby John." Through DNA testing, a forensic anthropologist will be able to determine whether that theory is plausible.

"I've always treated him as a family member," said Peavey, a cook at a Hooksett restaurant who spends his free time tracing his family history. "And I'll be disappointed if he's not." [Link]

Peavey's family had given the baby gifts: "ceramic angels, antique marbles, a quartz candle holder and a dried but once-living beta fish. (It was supposed to be the mummy's pet.)"

Police learned of the mummy's existence when Peavey's 4-year-old great-niece told a day-care bully, "Be careful. My uncle's a killer. He has a dead baby."

[tagged: genealogy, family tree, ancestry]

Putting Your Ancestors to Work

From The Arizona Republic:

Mummies in Mexico: It's a living

Chris Hawley
Republic Mexico City Bureau
Nov. 1, 2005 12:00 AM

GUANAJUATO, Mexico - The mummified baby sits alone in a glass case, its blue sweater still buttoned against the chill of death, its pale hands resting on the disposable diaper it was buried in.

Across the room, three severed heads gaze at the wall. A little girl with the face of a zombie clutches a smiling doll, and an infant in a baptismal gown laces its gnarled fingers as if in prayer. All were evicted from the city cemetery after their families stopped paying the rent on their graves.

[snip]

As if the real mummies aren't creepy enough, the $5 admission includes a campy chamber of horrors called the Room of Death Worship, where museum workers have used real body parts to assemble skeletons of Count Dracula and other legendary undead.

[snip]

"The purpose of this museum is to help maintain the entire city," [Guanajuato Mummy Museum Director Felipe] Macías said. "It's a business by which the dead of Guanajuato are giving something back to their city."

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

For These Dead Folks, Every Day is Earth Day

From The (London, U.K.) Sunday Times of Oct. 9, 2005:

Farmers targeted in hunt for green graves

Richard Oakley

MORE people than ever want to take their environmental concerns with them to the grave — quite literally. As a result, Irish landowners are being asked to provide plots for the country’s first-ever environmentally friendly burial sites.

[snip]

[Judith] Hoad, a herbalist and writer whose husband lies beneath an apple tree in her garden in Inver in Co Donegal, said: “Natural burials are a greener, more environmentally friendly form of departure from the earth. A site of land is made available and it can be privately owned or run by a council. It can be woodland or a nature conservation area or just a field or wild garden. There are trees and bushes, wildlife and fauna rather than gravestones, flower arrangements, gravel and mowed lawns.

People use eco-friendly coffins that allow their bodies to join the food chain as compost and feed other living things.”

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

Aren't there some baby seals we should save before we start worrying about the gravestones littering our countrysides?

Keep Your Friends Close, and Your Mother Closer

From newKerala.com of Oct. 5, 2005:

Man kept mother's body for 20 years

HYDERABAD, India: It took his own death to separate the man from his dead mother whose body he had kept in his Hyderabad, India, home for 20 years.

Syed Abdul Gafoor, a professor of English literature, had the body of his mother embalmed upon her death in their home in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh in 1985, the BBC reported.

[snip]

"In the large ancestral home, he lived in one room and the body was kept in another one. He had made it clear to us that the body should be buried only after his death," said a nephew of the professor. "He was so eccentric that he would not allow anybody to even look at the glass casket in which the body was kept."

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

Can Tupperware Be Far Behind?

From Reuters:

Swedes may be freeze-dried for eternal rest

By Sven Nordenstam

STOCKHOLM, Sept 26 (Reuters) - "There's three things we can do with your mum. We can bury her, burn her, or dump her." A fourth alternative -- freeze-drying -- could soon be added to British comedy group Monty Python's catalogue of burial methods.

Next year the Swedish town of Jonkoping hopes to pioneer this novel way of preparing people for their final resting place. The body will be frozen, dipped in liquid nitrogen and pulverised prior to burial.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]