Abby Burnett

Gone to the Grave (eBook, ePUB)

Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850-1950

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Before there was a death care industry where professional funeral directors offered embalming and other services, residents of the Arkansas Ozarks-and, for that matter, people throughout the South-buried their own dead. Every part of the complicated, labor-intensive process was handled within the deceased's community. This process included preparation of the body for burial, making a wooden coffin, digging the grave, and overseeing the burial ceremony, as well as observing a wide variety of customs and superstitions.

These traditions, especially in rural communities, remained the norm up through the end of World War II, after which a variety of factors, primarily the loss of manpower and the rise of the funeral industry, brought about the end of most customs.

Gone to the Grave, a meticulous autopsy of this now vanished way of life and death, documents mourning and practical rituals through interviews, diaries and reminiscences, obituaries, and a wide variety of other sources. Abby Burnett covers attempts to stave off death; passings that, for various reasons, could not be mourned according to tradition; factors contributing to high maternal and infant mortality; and the ways in which loss was expressed though obituaries and epitaphs. A concluding chapter examines early undertaking practices and the many angles funeral industry professionals worked to convince the public of the need for their services.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. April 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781626743427
• Artikelnr.: 43094997

Autorenporträt

Abby Burnett is an independent researcher who, as seen in the Arkansas Educational Television Network's 2010 documentary, "Silent Storytellers," studies such things as long-lost burial customs, tombstone symbolism, epitaphs, and the work of early stone carvers. She is author of Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850-1950, published by University Press of Mississippi. She has written entries on graveyards, stone carvers and early medicine for the online CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, in addition to doing public speaking on all aspects of burial in Arkansas, her adopted state for the past forty years.