Victorian Mourning Clothes
Victorian mourning clothes may have been hanging in your ancestor’s closet during the 1800s – a black dress with a high neck, black leather button-up shoes, a black top hat, and more. And when death brought those black clothes out of storage, your ancestors may...
10 Victorian Cemetery Traditions
Victorian cemetery traditions were very intimate. Funerals were often held in the home and mourning periods lasted for decades. Today, death is more removed from everyday life. Most people spend their final days in a hospital or nursing home. If someone does die at home,...
Burial Customs from Around the World
Burial customs from around the world provide an important link to our ancestors. They are physical evidence of a society’s spiritual beliefs, sometimes dating back thousands of years. Most people believe that their ancestor’s spirits journey to an afterlife but what their families do to...
Winged Skull Gravestone Symbols
Winged skull gravestone symbols were common in 18th-century cemeteries. While they may look strange to us today – even morbid or creepy – they held important meaning for our ancestors. Death was a frequent visitor to households in the 1700s. In many areas, it was...
Portraits in Stone
Families have been immortalizing their loved ones with portraits in stone on their gravesites for thousands of years. After all, it’s hard to lose the people you love. So we rationalize that if we could have just one last look at their face, it might...
Australian Gravestone Symbols
Waverley Cemetery in the suburbs of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia is consistently ranked as one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world – and it’s a great place to learn about Australian gravestone symbols. Waverly Cemetery is perched on high cliffs overlooking the...
