Gravestones/similar memorials

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

My Mum died a couple of months ago, her funeral was a month or so ago, and now we siblings are discussing arrangements for the interment of her ashes, with a small memorial (just name and dates) next to (or on same stone as) my Dad's small memorial in the local cemetery.

That got me thinking, and asking my elder siblings, what happened with each of my 4 grandparents? And my siblings seem to think no memorial was left for any of the 4 of them. Which struck me as sad, and also odd. Thinking of my ancestors a generation or two further back, there are tradional gravestones that we know of, for some of them (others lost in obscurity), and that's not because my ancestors were better off financially than the average person of their times: they weren't. I'm guessing it was just the done thing at least until well into the nineteenth century to have a gravestone in the cemetery.

So that prompts a general question: did gravestones and similar memorials (full size or the smaller ones for ashes) go out of fashion in the twentieth century? I'm hoping it wasn't just my family being particularly indifferent on that front.

[Patrick Thistle]

Gravestones/similar memorials

All my recent family bereavements have resulted in stones or plaques (going back to the first funeral I was a coffin bearer for back in 2000)

Odd sidenote: If you want to change your Dad's plaque to add your Mum's name you will need to find out which one of you and your siblings has inherited it. Only the person who 'owns' the grave can make changes to it. (As I discovered when my wife wanted to change her mother's plaque only to find that her dad's second wife now technically owned it after he had died.)

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Gravestones/similar memorials

Thanks PT, v helpful tip!

[Levin]

Gravestones/similar memorials

I think it's due to the acceptance of cremation as a means of funerary rite. Cremation was really not the done thing until after the 1st world war. Maybe because it was a new way of doing things it wasn't seen as necessary to have a stone.

Which probably ties into the rise in cremation in the UK being a result of space running out in cemeteries. Not that it was the only solution. My parents are buried in Brookwood, just a little way from the Orthodox monastery which is housed in what was the cemetery's station. The idea being that Brookwood would be the cemetery for the entirety of London with special trains running from Waterloo.

Anyway, I digress. My dad got a beautiful stone in green welsh slate for my mum. Carved, is that the right word? by Richard Kindersley. When my dad died me and my sister got him added underneath.

I don't have a digital picture of it annoyingly as I'd love to show it to you.

Edit: One of the main reasons for my dad going with Kindersley was that if you are going to pay a lot of money for a stone then get something nice rather than feeling you have to pick something off the shelf or rather out or a catalogue. It's a memorial of a person so get something that fits them.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Gravestones/similar memorials

Neither my parents nor, so far as I know, my grandparents have any memorial stone or plaque.

They're remembered by the things they made, or were important to them in some way.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Gravestones/similar memorials

Understood!

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Gravestones/similar memorials

I'd like my ashes to be made into two (small) diamonds (I understand they can do that) if it's not prohibitively expensive, so my girls can have a bit of me each.

Failing that, I'd like my wife to scatter me on some Mediterranean beach where hopefully most of the women are bathing topless.

[Patrick Thistle]

Gravestones/similar memorials

I think I've mentioned this before but there's a graveyard chock full of my family members (4 grandparents, loads of great uncles, my auntie). My Mum wants to be in there eventually. And I do too. (I've told people just in case.)

It's a stupid thing really but I don't know. I find it comforting in a weird way.

[Fussbudget]

Gravestones/similar memorials

Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote: I'd like my ashes to be made into two (small) diamonds (I understand they can do that) if it's not prohibitively expensive, so my girls can have a bit of me each.

Failing that, I'd like my wife to scatter me on some Mediterranean beach where hopefully most of the women are bathing topless.

Women like your aforementioned daughters for example, which would handily combine the two options.

[Lurgee]

Gravestones/similar memorials

Unless you have the good luck to be an emperor or pharaoh it is likely you'll be forgotten soon enough anyway. Our fate is that of the slaves Orwell described:

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves' names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker's name inscribed on the bottom, 'FELIX FECIT'. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence.

Though even Ozymandius showed that being King of Kings was not surety against being forgotten by future generations of slaves and emperors.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Though I dunno why the opening poster's ancestors may have eschewed tombstones. Could we get fanciful and suggest it might be a response to the Great War and the numbers of too early internments?

[Patrick Thistle]

Gravestones/similar memorials

I can add one to the list. Onesimus the runaway slave is the reason Paul writes the letter to Philemon in the New Testament.

Of course, usual caveats apply about how reliable such a document is.

[Lurgee]

Gravestones/similar memorials

Don't cherry pick.

If you accept the accuracy of the account of that incident, you basically have to accept the whole of Genesis, don't you?

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Gravestones/similar memorials

I don't think many people think of gravestones or similar memorials as intended to achieve permanent commemoration. It's just for the next generation or two. I mean, even if the human race survives and one has descendants for however many future generations you ask about, then (assuming genetic engineering doesn't erode the whole concept of parentage or the two parent system of nature, which is a big assumption given the pace of science) after, say, 10 generations each of us is just one of 2^10 (=1,024) equally relevant ancestors to his or her descendants of that generation. (or perhaps slightly fewer due to eventual n'th cousin hook-ups).

[Patrick Thistle]

Gravestones/similar memorials

Lurgee wrote: Don't cherry pick.

If you accept the accuracy of the account of that incident, you basically have to accept the whole of Genesis, don't you?

No, I don't think so. It's a compilation, after all. You can approach each bit on its own merits regarding authenticity, accuracy and so on.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Gravestones/similar memorials

you basically have to accept the whole of Genesis

That's too inflexible. Some people like the albums they did with Peter Gabriel but not the ones they made after he left and Phil Collins stepped up to sing.

[Guy Profumo]

Gravestones/similar memorials

Evariste Euler Gauss wrote:

you basically have to accept the whole of Genesis

That's too inflexible. Some people like the albums they did with Peter Gabriel but not the ones they made after he left and Phil Collins stepped up to sing.

Stepped up?

Barging his way to the front after staging a bloodless coup more like.