A Brief History of Headstones
It’s that time of year! “Graveyards” are popping up in neighborhoods and front yards all across this great land: tombstones askew, phalanges and femurs poking up through the...
Cemeteries
Disturbing the Dead: When and How
At some point, many funeral homes will be asked to reverse their usual process and “unbury” a corpse. Disinterment, while not widespread, certainly isn’t uncommon in the modern...
So Many Tools to Trick Out Your Tombstone
Cremation rates may be rising rapidly, but that doesn’t mean traditional burial plots will be obsolete anytime soon. In 2018, cartographer Joshua Stevens created a map showing that...
Simple Ideas to Get Involved This Memorial Day
The national holiday we now know as Memorial Day started out in the late 1860s as “Decoration Day,” a remembrance of fallen Civil War soldiers held on May...
Dust to Dust: Deconstructing Decomposition
How long does it take a decomposing body to return fully to the earth? We’re talking old-school decomp, here, excluding processes like cremation in any of its forms. ...
A Brief History of Burial in the United States
Today, when families select their loved one’s format of final disposition from a menu of eco-friendly alternatives, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time burial was...
Hart Island, Nation’s Largest Public Cemetery, to Become a Public Park
First used as a public cemetery for unclaimed and unidentified bodies in 1869, New York's Hart Island, home to the remains of over one million people and the...