Quotes and Cats

Part of the research question our group decided on when looking at the St. Luke's Church cemetery looked at the expression of identity on the monuments. The most interesting thing I found is the detail given about an individual's life drops off during the twentieth century.

One of the older monuments at St. Luke's.

The burials from the late 1800s all give familial relationships, birthplace, and a quote (biblical or otherwise). Yet after 1950, there's only two markers (out of about 7 we looked at from that time period) give anything beyond the years of life and the name. Why was the identity of the individual devalued to two numbers and a name? In the family burial plots where we noticed this, the family name was more decorated than other plots--one had one of the only symbol inscriptions in our sample. Was the family becoming more important as space decreased? Or was it due to something that happened during the early 1900s that changed the style?

A non-traditional monument we found in the cremations section.

Cremations were introduced to save space in the small cemetery. One of the cremation markers we looked at had a cat on it; not something you'd expect to see in an Anglican cemetery, is it? But besides the cat, there was no information past the minimum inscribed. It seems like with the adoption of a new practice, nontraditional symbols are also being accepted as a way to describe the personality or identity of someone without words.