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Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!

Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!

Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.

Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.

Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.

West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.

Forgotten dead to get final rest

Written by DeadGirl
Tuesday, 06 June 2006
Coffins from the 1800s were found under a street. The 15 are to be reburied. By Edward Colimore Inquirer Staff Writer Nobody is sure who they are or how they died. The 15 men, women and children appear to have been hastily buried in simple pine coffins, some stacked four deep under Washington Avenue near the Italian Market. After more than 180 years, a woman was still wearing a thin gold wedding band and covered at the waist by a folded woolen shawl or blanket. Infants had silk ribbons, tied in starlike designs, placed on their chests. And a man - nicknamed "Big Red" by the recovery team - had tufts of red hair and flesh on the bones. They had lain undisturbed until a contractor digging a trench for a water line discovered them in October 2001. And then they went on the journey. The first stop was Temple University's anthropology department to be studied and temporarily stored in cardboard boxes. Next came moves to receiving vaults at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd and Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. But this weekend, thanks to a diverse group of local residents, the early Philadelphians will have a permanent resting place at Laurel Hill, in the company of some of the city's greatest military, political, literary and business leaders. The four men, five women and six children will be remembered at noon Sunday as part of a Memorial Day weekend program that includes ceremonies to honor Civil War and all veterans at the sprawling necropolis. At least two men in the group were old enough at the time of death to have served in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. "These are people. They had histories, they had memories, they had families," said Andy Waskie, a Temple instructor and historian involved in the recovery. "Just because they were discovered during excavation work, analyzed, and carried hither and yon," he said, "doesn't mean that they don't deserve a dignified, appropriate burial in sanctified ground. This is a basic human right." Looking over the picturesque cemetery with its rolling hills, obelisks and mausoleums, Laurel Hill executive director Ross Mitchell smiled and added: "This is a much more dignified place than lying under Washington Avenue." The remains will be placed into small wooden caskets, then tucked into niches created in a single underground concrete vault donated by the cemetery. "I've been waiting for this for a long time," said Frank Rausch, a ground crew foreman at Laurel Hill and one of the volunteers who helped recover the remains. The bodies were almost left at the original burial site in 2001 by the excavators, who planned to lay pipe over them. But historic-preservation activists urged officials to allow exhumation and reburial. Waskie, who teaches Civil War history and German, and Suzanne Haney, who heads the Southwark Civil War Historic District Committee, asked city lawyer J. Matthew Wolfe to seek permission from the city Orphan's Court. The two were given three days in February 2002 to retrieve and relocate the bodies and coffins. Before the work could begin, they helped raise thousands of dollars from a local historic-preservation group and individuals to hire a backhoe contractor for the job. And they enlisted volunteers from Laurel Hill Cemetery and Temple's anthropology department to place the remains in the cardboard boxes. Associate professor R. Michael Stewart, who led the Temple archaeologists, reported discovery of several artifacts, including the gold ring, the small blanket, the star-shaped ribbons, and remnants of silk bands that might have been part of bonnets. Those items and others - white metal coffin trim, a pipe stem, and bone buttons - will become part of Laurel Hill's museum at the gatehouse. At least one hexagonal coffin with an arched top will be restored and added to the museum collection. The personal effects, the remains, the location of the burials, and the stacked coffins have provided clues about the people's backgrounds and causes of death, Waskie said. The bodies were originally interred along what was Love's Lane, across from the former "Bishop's Ground," or Old St. Joseph's Catholic Cemetery, possibly in an area used in the early 19th century for fever or plague victims, Waskie said. "Through the passage of time, the narrow country road then in existence was expanded to create Washington Avenue, a grand boulevard leading through a populated industrial area," Waskie said. "Perhaps the forgotten graves of the unfortunate victims of fever and plague were consciously or unconsciously covered over until their recent accidental discovery." Thomas Crist, a forensic anthropologist who has served the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, told the court in a report that the adults and children were "of European descent and would have been socially recognized as white." Waskie said he believed they "were Catholic, and probably Irish or French." Researchers working at the trench in 2002 saw evidence of many other burials along the walls of the excavation, but those remains were outside the court-approved recovery area. This week, at Laurel Hill, Waskie and Mitchell watched a worker digging the new burial site with a backhoe. "This cemetery is a national historical landmark," Waskie said. "Nothing will happen to them in this place. This is the permanent, final disposition for 15 lives." http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/states/new_jersey/14669432.htm

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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries