Legacy Matters
The clothespin gravestone marked the grave of W. Jack Crowell, who owned the National Clothespin Company, the last wooden clothespin manufacturer in the United States (today it produces plastic clothespins and barrettes). Originally, Jack wanted a giant clothespin with real spring so children could teeter on it.
Late rapper's family denied headstone inscribed with song lyric because it included the F-word
Sonny ‘Uno’ Santiago, 23, was a rapper who died in a car crash in February. Commissioners at Pine Grove Cemetery in Lynn this week unanimously rejected his family's request to inscribe his gravestone with a song verse that included a profanity.
The panel became aware of the language when the company inscribing the 3-foot tall memorial submitted drawings to commissioners.
The inscription read: 'You gonna remember the damn name, I give a f*** if I die with no damn friends, I got my fam by my side and that’s until the end.’
Pine Grove Cemetery regulations posted online state that ‘the cemetery office must approve all inscription work on monuments.’
City officials contacted the family about the inscription and they agreed to have the gravestone inscribed with a different, profanity-free verse from a song Santiago wrote.
Good for them. I hope all other cemeteries take not of the regulations they should impose on themselves.
Tombstones of Russian gangsters
They used to spend their days collecting protection money, kneecapping those who would not pay up and planting explosives in the cars of their rivals.
But now the only reminders of the gangsters that made up the Russian mobs in the 1990s are their tombstones with gaudy sketches of them etched into the granite.
The men, who are casualties of the Russian business world and were relatively young when they were killed, are sculpted standing in designer suits and leather jackets.
Wanted: Mausoleum w/Wi-Fi, Cable, River Vu
I got an advertisement in the mail the other day for a fancy marble mausoleum being built in Jersey.
“You’ve worked hard your whole life,” it read. “Now, don’t you want to reward yourself with the very best?”
A historic church and graveyard which features in Bram Stoker's Gothic novel Dracula is faced with a horror story of its own.
Human bones uncovered after a landslide last month have been washed down the cliff St Mary's Church stands on in Whitby after heavy rainfall.
The human remains are then being collected at the bottom of the cliff face and re-buried.
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St Mary's Reverend Canon David Smith said: 'The cemetery has been a closed for more than a century so if any graves are exposed it's only bones.
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Meanwhile residents and business owners are terrified the cliff will be hit with more rainfall.
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The landslide has been blamed on a drainage pipe which broke when the cliff began to crumble. Heavy rainfall saturated the soil and lead to the mudslide.
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The landslide comes after five houses in Aelfelda Terrace, Whitby, were demolished last month after flooding washed the steep bank beneath them away.
Paris hit by wave of street muggings and grave robberies
Austerity-struck Paris has been hit by a wave of street muggings and grave robberies with thieves prepared to exhume bodies to steal gold and jewelry.
Last week, police in the French capital arrested three people as part of a widening grave robbery investigation.
There was further public outrage after two masked intruders shot dead a 52-year old precious metal worker when he tried to stop them stealing gold from his foundry in the chic central Parisian district of Le Marais.
Police said sky-high market prices for precious metals are acting as a magnet for thieves with scant regard for the living or the dead.
In Pantin cemetery, in the north of Paris, dozens of bodies have recently been dug up, with gold teeth and jewelry stolen from them.
Police sources said the three men seized last week were gravediggers employed by the city's cemeteries.
Last month, four other men – three from the same Pantin cemetery – were arrested and placed under investigation for aggravated theft, grave robbery and violating the integrity of a corpse.
Last month, four other men – three from the same Pantin cemetery – were arrested and placed under investigation for aggravated theft, grave robbery and violating the integrity of a corpse.
According to a source close to the investigation, the men removed personal belongings from corpses in the freshest graves, opening them in the dead of night.b Two of the men were caught wearing miner's helmets and gloves. Their boots were covered in fresh earth.
One of the suspects was found to be carrying 10 gold teeth.
After the initial arrests, the mayor of Paris, Bernard Delanoe, expressed his outrage and ordered the city authorities to step up surveillance of cemeteries.
The Queen is known to be inseparable from her beloved Corgis. Now poignant pictures have emerged of the graves of royal pets from throughout the generations. The little-known plot is hidden away in a quiet corner of the 20,000-acre Sandringham estate in Norfolk.
It was created by Queen Victoria after the death of her Collie, Noble, in 1887, and revived in 1959 when Elizabeth II wanted somewhere to bury her first Corgi, Susan.
Before he became a famous novelist, Thomas Hardy worked at an architectural firm in London.
The Hardy Tree: an Earl Work of a Great Novelist
It was during this time that an older part of St Pancras Churchyard was designated for almost total obliteration in order to make way for a new railway line. The Bishop of London gave the contract for this work to Blomfield who passed responsibility on to his young student, Hardy. Yet these objects in the way of progress could not be cleared like slums. Even progress occasionally must respect what came before and the removal and relocation of so many middle class graves would almost certainly have caused an uproar if it was not done properly.
The coffins were removed from the site with circumspection and care and were reburied elsewhere (the Victorian English had a horror of cremation). There was no need to move the headstones. Yet although the graves were old and unvisited it would not have been respectful to simply dump the headstones in to the Thames.
The process would have taken a great deal of time and young Hardy, who was 25 when he was given this commission would have spent the best part of a year overseeing the work. Perhaps his experiences in St Pancras church yard later informed some of the bleaker passages in his novels.
Some of the headstones were placed in a circular pattern around a young ash tree in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, far enough away from the site of the railway for them never to have to be disturbed again. Over the decades the tree has, inevitably grown and parts of the headstones nearest the tree have disappeared in to its growth.
A woman walking along a San Francisco beach found an eerie surprise when she realized that one of the rocks along the shoreline was in fact a tombstone.
Teresa Trego was not the first person to spot old tombstones next to the small pebbles along Ocean Beach.
While there are no longer bodies at the site, it once was used as a cemetery and the tombstones were left to help stave off erosion in the early 1900s.
It's kind of poignant but it's also kind of what San Francisco's all about: we're a small town, we reuse everything,' Ms Trego said.
In the late 1800s, people in the burgeoning city of San Francisco set up a cemetery at Laurel Hill, which was then considered far out from the beginnings of the city. San Francisco Bay reports that as the urban area grew, however, the city and the families of the deceased moved their bodies further inland to Colma, but left the tombstones in place.
'Golden Gate was a cemetery where people weren't necessarily wealthy, and so those people and their descendants were less likely to have the means to move the gravestones back down to the new graves,' one park official told Fox News.
I doubt that explanation. If families had the means to excavate the bodies, they would take the tombstones as well.
Virginia law would offer tax breaks to residents buried in space
Looking for a really awesome way to lower your taxes? Virginia residents may want to consider having their cremated remains blasted into space. The state is considering a law that would give folks who want to mingle their ashes with the debris of space up to $2500 a year in deductions, with an $8000 cap.
If the measure passes, the final pitstop for folks who take advantage of the tax break will be the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. The purpose of the law is to increase revenue for the spaceport, which is looking to expand in response to the cancellation of NASA's space shuttle program.
German soldiers preserved in World War I shelter discovered after nearly 100 years
Twenty-one German soldiers entombed in a perfectly preserved World War One shelter have been discovered 94 years after they were killed.
The men were part of a larger group of 34 who were buried alive when an Allied shell exploded above the tunnel in 1918 causing it to cave in.
Thirteen bodies were recovered from the underground shelter but the remaining men had to be left under a mountain of mud as it was too dangerous to retrieve them.
Nearly a century later French archaeologists stumbled upon the mass grave on the former Western Front during excavation work for a road building project.
Many of the skeletal remains were found in the same positions the men had been in at the time of the collapse, prompting experts to liken the scene to Pompeii.
A number of the soldiers were discovered sitting upright on a bench, one was lying in his bed and another was in the foetal position having been thrown down a flight of stairs.
As well as the bodies, poignant personal effects such as boots, helmets, weapons, wine bottles, spectacles, wallets, pipes, cigarette cases and pocket books were also found.
Even the skeleton of a goat was found, assumed to be a source of fresh milk for the soldiers.
Archaeologists believe the items were so well preserved because hardly any air, water or lights had penetrated the trench.
The 300ft long tunnel was located 18ft beneath the surface near the small town of Carspach in the Alsace region in France.
Together forever...lovers holding hands for 1500 years discovered in Rome grave
Laid out side by side and holding hands, these 1,500-year-old male and female skeletons are surely a sign of eternal love if ever there was one.
The lovers were probably even ‘looking into each other’s eyes’ when they were buried in the 5th century, during the final days of the Roman Empire.
The extraordinary discovery was made by archaeologists excavating an Ancient Roman palace in the Italian town of Mutina, known today as Modena.
Anthropologist Vania Milani said: ‘It was a very touching and beautiful sight to see. The woman’s head is turned towards the man and they were holding each other’s hands. I suspect the head of the man was also turned towards the woman at the time of burial and that it was probably resting on a cushion which then decomposed over time and caused it to roll away. They would have been looking into each other’s eyes at the time of burial in a sign of eternal love.’
Today is All Souls Day, the day when we pray for the dead. Looking to visit a grave or a cemetery?
Findagrave is your resource that holds some 70 million grave records. With 8-10 million page views a day, it started as a joke.
When Jim Tipton saw a massive tombstone in a Gainesville, Fl., cemetery that was engraved with the name Waldo, he snapped a photo, developed the film and coded a rudimentary HTML website, which he titled "I Found Him." The year was 1995.
From that droll joke, which was seen by a few hundred early web adopters, grew FindaGrave.com, easily the world's most extensive and trafficked online database of graves. On any given day FindaGrave.com serves 8-10 million page views. The crowd-sourced knowledge base even tracks down the final resting places of individuals. Ask the site’s users to locate where dead loved ones lie and, according to Tipton, 80 percent of the time you'll have an answer.
"It's something that happened to me rather than something I did," Tipton told me over the phone a few weeks ago, referring to the success of a site he started as a lark.
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That meager collection snowballed into database that became huge. "The power of the crowd really energized the site," he said. People whom Tipton affectionately calls the black sheep, death obsessed, cemetery walkers came out of nowhere and added grave after grave. Today, the site's users add grave records at three times the U.S. death rate. For the past 16 years, he's just been trying to keep up with the flood.
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Find a Grave lets the living connect with the past. Long-lost lovers, army buddies, childhood friends, those ghosts we carry with us can be found by a simple query and the efforts of an army of cemetery walkers sharing their solitary pursuit through Find A Grave.