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.
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.
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