He Ain't Heavy, He's My Dead Husband

Language Log today has an interesting post on the language of the Carrier people of British Columbia. With the arrival of a Francophone priest in 1865, and the subsequent influence of English speakers, their names changed.

There are a few family names of Carrier origin. There are a great many people named “Ketlo”, which is the anglicization of /ketloh/ (English speakers can’t hear the final /h/), which is the contracted form of /ke dʌtloh/ “squishy shoes”. The progenitor of the family was called by this nickname because he was always getting his feet wet.

As I mentioned, the idea of having both a given name and a family name was an innovation of the late 19th century, and to Carrier people it wasn’t terribly clear which was which or how they were passed on. As a result, some children would take their father’s first name as their family name and some the second. The little village of K’uzche, for example, is populated mostly by people named either “William” or “Austin”. They are actually the same family: the patriarch was named “William Austin”.

Wikipedia offers this account of how the Dakelh came to be called "Carriers":

According to noted anthropologist Antonia Mills, the term "Carrier" was derived from the mortuary tradition of carrying the husband's ashes back to the main traditional village site, where a potlatch would be held acknowledging the passing of the individual and dealing with redistributing his property. Which would make sense when considering seasonal movements and the need to bring the ashes back to the village as proof.

Posthumously Posted

Dropping someone's cremains in a mailbox is bad enough, but forgetting to address the package is unforgivable.

The letter carrier found the package wrapped haphazardly in a plastic bag, with no mailing address or return address, and notified police. A police dog did not detect any explosives, so officers opened it and found a box with a metal plate with the deceased person's name on it and the years "1957-2000." [Link]

[Thanks, Nancy!]

Another Turtle Alert

It seems like all the news out of New York these days concerns turtles.

Anita Lewis of Elmira is desperately seeking the woman who bought a ceramic turtle from her on Saturday. Lewis was unaware that the large, brown turtle contained the ashes of her husband’s previous wife. [Link]

[Thanks, Nancy!]

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.

Created From the Cremated

I've blogged before about pencils made from cremains. A company in Canada has taken it one step further.

Each sketch has a little something of the subject in it -- namely a tablespoon-sized portion of their cremated ashes.

Honor Industries takes the ashes to create a pencil, which an artist then uses to draw a lifelike portrait of the deceased based on a selected photograph.

The portrait is encased in glass and framed. Customers can choose to have the pencil itself included in the display. [Link]

Keep Grandma on the Porch

Someone has finally figured out how to combine wind chimes with cremation urns.

LifeSong Urns also plans to offer in the near future, twin vaulted urns as memorials for husbands and wives and other life relationships. These twin vaulted urns may also be used for individuals with the second vault used as a time capsule to hold small keepsakes. Another innovation from LifeSong Urns is the optional "biography or genealogy" plaque. This plaque tells the story of your loved ones life on earth and further personalizes your LifeSong Wind Chime Urn. [Link]

Ashes to Asphalt

This is not the way you want your relatives to end up. An undertaking outfit in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, has been accused of mishandling the cremated remains of its clients.

Undertakers have been accused of using human ashes to grit the path outside their funeral home.

It is also claimed staff disposed of ashes which were later to be claimed by a bereaved family by accident.

One worker said that, when the family arrived, their urn was filled with ashes which had lain unclaimed in the office for 50 years. [Link]

Papa Was a Rolling Stone's Jones

We all have different ways of honoring our fathers. Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards inhaled his.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive." [Link]

[Thanks, John!]

CC Your Ancestors

Here's the perfect way to carry your ancestors with you while you research their lives: Nadine Jarvis's Carbon Copies.

Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash - a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.

[via Neatorama]

Cemetery Mistaken for Ash Dump

A box containing the cremains of James William Hodge showed up in a Wyoming cemetery 25 years after his death, but nobody knows how.

Dema Gilbert, Pine Bluff's town clerk for 25 years, said the community would love to find out how Hodge's remains found their way to the town.

"I guess we’re kind of at a dead end," said Gilbert, who will be retiring Jan. 4 after 25 years, with tongue stuck firmly in her cheek. "Actually, it's kind of sad that maybe somewhere he has family that might want his ashes back." [Link]

The Youngest Titanic Survivor

The ashes of Ellen Walker have been scattered over the Atlantic, a year after her death and a few thousand miles from where her supposed father drowned. Walker claimed to have been conceived aboard the Titanic, the child of lovers Henry Morley and Kate Phillips.

The shopkeeper's affair with the 19-year-old Miss Phillips, saw them book a second-class crossing to begin a new life in America.

But that dream was destroyed when Mr Morley, who was married with a family, drowned on April 15, 1912.

Miss Phillips however, was rescued in a lifeboat. And nine months later, in January 1913, Ellen Walker was born.

She spent most of her life unaware of her father's identity, but on discovering the truth, began an unsuccessful campaign to have his name added to her birth certificate. [Link]

Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean—born nine weeks before the sinking and living still—is generally regarded the youngest survivor of the tragedy. It is rumored on a message board that Walker "got in Millvina Dean's face at one point, shaking her finger and declaring "I AM THE YOUNGEST TITANIC SURVIVOR!"

They'd Never Seen a Wilder Tomb

A California couple found Gertrude M. Wilder hanging around in their backyard. They wouldn't mind her staying, but would just as soon reunite her with her husband.

DeeDee and Dan Armenta thought the odd-looking brick-and-stone structure in the backyard of the house they bought a year ago was a barbecue pit, or possibly a fountain. But when they started jackhammering through it while landscaping late last month, they found it was something they'd never expected: a tomb.

The couple found a headstone with the names of Gertrude M. Wilder, 1878-1941, and William R. Wilder, with a birth date of 1882 but no date of death. A decayed cardboard container, bearing a barely legible "Gertrude" and "Dec. 11, 1941" in typing, accompanied cremated remains in a disintegrating redwood box buried inside the 4-foot by 4-foot round brick structure. [Link]

Update (Sept. 30, 2006): A descendant of the Wilders has been found, and Gertrude is staying put.

Stiff Stacking Studied

There are plans afoot to permit "double-decker burials" in some 19th-century English graveyards.

Lack of space and people wanting burial not cremation has prompted the idea for earlier remains to be re-buried deeper, allowing a "second sitting" above them in the same grave.

The headstone is then altered to include the new arrival. [Link]

Not All Men Are Cremated Equal

The New York Times today examines the growing demand for ostentatious mausoleums in some affluent communities.

Some mausoleums echo the temple of the goddess Fortuna Virilis in Rome. Some are hefty, rusticated stone barns. Some have more square footage than a good-size Manhattan studio apartment, their interiors fitted out with hand-knotted carpets, upholstered benches and nooks for the display of memorabilia. In late 2004, a Southern California family ordered a mausoleum with room for 12 coffins, 20 cremation niches and a patterned marble vestibule. [Link]

The Hartford Courant explores the other end of the funereal spectrum: the burial of indigents in Connecticut over the years.

Hartford undertakers were steaming under their high collars in 1904 when an East Hartford funeral director underbid them for a contract to inter the capital city's destitute. The city's charity board was paying $6.50 to bury an infant, $10 for children up to age 12 and $15 for adults. More important, the funeral parlor that held the city contract also took donations from friends and relatives. Competition was fierce.

"At times," The Courant reported in 1899, "the police have been bothered by rival undertakers scrambling for a body found in the river, or in cases where the medical examiner has been called. " [Link]

[tagged: genealogy, family tree, ancestry]

Can You Hear Me Now?

More people than ever are asking to spend eternity with their cell phones. The trend started in South Africa among people who feared being buried alive while under the spell of a witch, but has now spread to Ireland, Australia, Ghana, and the United States.

Mobile phone batteries cause nasty explosions when incinerated, so crematorium clients require special arrangements.

Some funeral parlours will now arrange for the phone [to be] put into the box with the ashes following the cremation.

And one service in South Africa will put a number of batteries in the coffin just in case the dead person wakes up much later and finds their own battery has run out. [Link]

I'd hate to be on the other end of that phone call.

[tagged: genealogy, family tree, ancestry]

Good Things Come in Small Packages

From The (Madison, Wisc.) Capital Times of Jan. 31, 2006:

When cremains remain unclaimed

By Mary Bergin

[snip]

State law requires a funeral home to keep cremains for 60 days; they then can be placed in a grave, niche, crypt or disposed of "in any other lawful manner." The crematory, not the funeral home, is legally obligated to keep a record of who is cremated, when and to whom the cremains are delivered.

So there is nothing, outside of conscience and reputation, to stop a funeral home from flushing the unclaimed human ashes that it receives. But both are big considerations.

"To us, these are people, even though they are in small containers," [Cress Funeral and Cremation Service president Bill] Cress says. "I don't care if some were homeless, or considered despicable."

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

[tagged: genealogy]

No Fear of Cremains, But Clowns Are Creepy

From the Quincy (Ill.) Herald-Whig:

Quincy duo documents, puts to DVD burial of Civil War veteran

Monday, December 26, 2005

By Casey Lewis
Herald-Whig Staff Writer

The re-enactment of the funeral for John Peyton Byrne, the last soldier from the Civil War to be buried, is captured on a DVD that was filmed and produced by local filmmakers Randy Dickerman and Dustin Hall.

[snip]

"The Last Farewell" captures a historic and personal ceremony on film, but for Dickerman and Hall, it also taught them about the history of the Civil War, provided experience and sparked an interest in documentaries.

Dickerman said they hope to do a documentary about the history of Quincy, and another about coulrophobia, the fear of clowns.

[Read the whole story]

tags: genealogy, family history, family tree

Beaming Him Up Didn't Work Either

From The Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald:

'I canna make it go captain'

November 16, 2005 - 2:46PM

In life, James Doohan was the Star Trek engineer who worked miracles on the Enterprise, but a rocket meant to blast his remains into space has engine trouble.

A Falcon One rocket was to lift the ashes of Doohan, who played engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott aboard the fictional Starship Enterprise, into space next month but the launch has been delayed at least until February, organisers said Tuesday.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

Ashes to Auction, Dust to Dust

From The (Waterville, Me.) Morning Sentinel of Oct. 18, 2005:

Auction yields human remains

By LARRY GRARD
Staff Writer

SKOWHEGAN -- A former undertaker, Annie Rooney knew exactly what she was looking at when she opened a Chinese ginger jar she had purchased a year ago, at an auction.

A plastic jar inside the ornate blue jar was filled with something, Rooney already knew, judging by its weight. But it wasn't sand, as she had assumed. No, what Rooney had purchased as part of an auction "box lot" -- a group of odds and ends that auctioneers typically sell in a box -- were human remains.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

The second human-remains-auction story of the afternoon. Some days my job is really easy.

His Brother's Keeper

From the Ann Arbor (Mich.) News:

Kin's ashes are found after decades

Man's search for remains of brother who died in 1947 ends at Muehlig Funeral Chapel

Saturday, September 10, 2005

BY ART AISNER
News Staff Reporter

For seven years he scoured dozens of cemetery plot maps, public health and hospital records, and family files to complete a genealogy that would trace seven generations of his lineage, including a brief but significant stay in Ann Arbor.

Yet for all the hours he toiled perusing microfiche, government documents and visiting the graves of kin in several states, Ward had nothing to show for his search for a younger brother who died just shy of three months old in 1947.

That was until last month, when staff members at the Muehlig Funeral Chapel in Ann Arbor made a unique discovery that has had a profound effect on them while bringing Ward a sense of closure.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]