Walk through a modern-day cemetery and there’s precious little to chronicle the ones who lie buried beneath the earth. Costs and size limitations now usually limit this unique encapsulation of one’s journey on earth to the bare essentials: names and dates.
Such was not the case in centuries gone by, as we can see by their epitaphs carved in stone.
Some are downright malicious, spitting out details and names that would land today’s epitaph writers into court. Their practice of "telling it like it was" in durable stone tarnished some families’ names forever. Like the example of a woman’s family who announced on a Wethersfield, CT tombstone in 1782 that interred beneath the ground was a 32 year-old mother and two of her children, killed by their husband and father:
"Fell by the hands of William Beadle
an infatuated Man who closed the
horrid sacrifice of his Wife
& Children with his own destruction."
Early history suggests that abuse by husbands was not uncommon, but sometimes the wife got the upper hand, as in this cryptic poem on the tombstone of "Warren Gibbs Mar. 23, 1860, Aged 36 yrs." His brother "Wm. Gibbs" erected the stone.
"Think my friends when this you see
How my wife has done for me
She in some oysters did prepare
Some poison for my lot and fare
Then of the same I did partake
And Nature yielded to its fate.
Before she was my wife became
Mary Felton was her name."
Sometimes the tombstones eerily portray life and death situations that could be lifted out of today’s newspaper — what happens, for example, when you mix schoolyards and guns. An 1854 New Hampshire stone broadcast what happened to schoolgirl Sevilla Jones at age 17:
"Thus fell this lovely blooming daughter
By the revengeful hand—a malicious Henry
When on her way to school he met her
And with a six self cocked pistol shot her."
Incidentally, not far from Sevilla’s stone, another reports Henry’s suicide the same day. But, so no one forgets, it identifies him as the "Murderer of Sevilla Jones."
Epitaphs also show the foolhardiness of teens is not a 21st century phenomenon. Sixteen-year-old Albert Fuller found out the hard way in 1838 that fireworks are deadly:
"His death was occasioned by
an accidental blast of powder
on July 4th."
Because there’s more documentation than ever about one’s life and death, the lack of tombstone epitaphs won’t affect how much one’s descendants know about us. It will, however, affect one of the more colorful methods of passing along information to our progeny.
Source: “Over Their Dead Bodies, Yankee Epitaphs and History” by Thomas C. Mann & Janet Greene (1962 and 1990).
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