Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

This guide also examines the funeral customs of various ethnic groups and includes a social history of death that reveals both the usual and unusual ways in which readers' ancestors coped with and celebrated death.

Average Customer Rating:

Helpful tips, great information	Customer Rating:
I love this book. Helpful for the geneaologist as well as the cemetery lover. Great tips on preserving tombstones, care of them, and researching those interred. Very helpful.

The Pleasure of being a 'Placophile' .

Customer Rating:

This book on tombstone research isn't perfect.Yet,it is one of the most popular and facilitative ones around.The design styles and marking patterns reveal much about when the stone was cut and their popularity for their day.In the old days,cemeteries were places were the family gathered for Sunday picnics and honored the lives of their forefathers.Inscriptions were witticisms and caveats to living,reminders for the mourners.God's acre ,the final resting place for the deceased.This book offers the reader great insight into what the novice researcher should look for.The meanings behind the symbols.Among stonecutters of yesteryear,their was an understood secretive code for the intombed and interred. For example,a 'lamb' indicated the passing of a child and with a 'half-moon' indicated it was a second-bourne child.Another example,upside-down torches connoted a ceasation of a family line,with no further namesake to carry the surname.Hour-glasses and skull headstones were popular during the seventeenth century,and has a renaissance of popularity among some of today's taphaphiles.Many of the headstones of twentith century became rather mundane.With the linear belief of modern monotheistic mankind,an after-life or the idea of rebirth, was seen as nonsense.Elaborate tombstones and sepulchral sarcophaguses are still the best way to honor the lives of the parted and praise for the good.These cenotaphs for the missing perished ones,bone-chambers of the deceased and grave-plaques of the buried; are earthly reminders of "who" our ancestors were before us.This book is one of the best to help the living ,respectfully chart and navigate around the addresses of the hallowed necropolis.

Excellent book for cemetery enthusiasts and genealogists alike

Customer Rating:

This is the book I recommend to everyone who takes my Cemetery Art classes. There is information on how to use cemeteries as research, how to research cemeteries, how to perform gravestone rubbings properly, how to even make a cast of a gravestone, gravestone symbolism and so much more. It's the best book on cemetery research I've come across. Sharon's writing is friendly and inviting. This is a MUST!

Your Guide to Cemetery Research	Customer Rating:
Your Guide to Cemetery Research is clearly written and comprehensive. It is an important tool for the geneologist or historian and includes many resource materials. It will be valuable to me in writing a series of articles on an important historical cemetery. Clear and cogent writing.

Cemetery research	Customer Rating:
Very complete and informative. Good list of sources to look for information.