History in the Obituaries
Call me a morbid historian, but I have always been interested in old cemeteries---there's a civil war cemetery close by and I stopped one day when city docents were hosting tours. The group had put together a booklet with the actual obituaries on some 25 of people who were buried there. This interesting booklet recorded the lives of the pioneers and soldiers and everyday folk who lived outside of San Fransisco in the late 1800's. As one reads, it is easy to feel the joys and the sorrow the successes and failures, the dreams and tragedies of people we will never know. Newspaper obituaries of the time were surprisingly uncensored in their accounts of the worth of the person, the way they died and how they were grieved---or not. There was no such thing as political correctness, that's for sure. These obituaries are preachy, prejudiced, judgmental, sentimental, and heartfelt. Deaths were described in graphic detail as were the personal habits and personalities of the recently ...