More on New Orleans burials, from the Queen of the Dead: the water table is indeed very high, so in the early years (1700s), the only way to make a coffin stay down was to drill holes in it and JUMP UP AND DOWN ON IT till it sank.
Obviously, people soon began putting in above-ground crypts. Usually families have their own: the body in put into the vault to “bake,” then a year and a day later the remains are shoveled down into the . . . Ummm, can’t think of the word, but it’s the common pit full o’ family.
My family has a nice old-fashioned graveyard going back about 100 years—but I expect it will be plowed under for condos eventually, so I am planning to be cremated and scattered in a nice pond I know of.
“The stone used for headstones in UK cemetries tends to disintegrate anyway in the British weather. The epitaphs on older gravestones are therefore often illegible. This may seem a bit pointless, but that’s the way it is. The assumption is probably that such headstones will be removed prior to the reuse of the plots.”
I reckon it’s because of air quality; acid rain, the coal burning, and so on. Also, a lot may be due to the type of stone used. If it’s porous and water gets into cracks and such, the stones will break up. I suppose the stone used in the UK graves is/was similar to that used in colonial and early America. If you go to to places like Williamsburg VA where the air is cleaner, you can find quite legible graves going back into the late 1600’s, whereas in the greater DC area, the legibility of graves from the 1700’s gets iffy. Also, marble (which I gather is quite sensitive to acid) if used on memorials gets tough to read right quickly, even from the mid or late 1800’s. I see a lot of what appears to be granite on new stones now.
But… what about the continental cemetaries that are all full of stones, almost touching on all sides?
FYI: A “grave” issue in MD is access to graves. It happens that churches and so on get abandonded, and the land goes to residental use. Occasionally this puts graves on private property. The new owners of the land are not required to grant access to or maintain the old graves.
In some cases (such as recently in Rockville MD) an older, untended graveyard was percieved as vacant lot (what I reckon you all in the UK call “waste ground”) and was used by as a dumpsite. The local civic pride orgnaization had to get volunteers to clean it up and do what they could to fix up the graves.
A guy I know who does construction said once they were doing some digging for a road in N MD, and they came up with a scooper load of skulls and bones. Instead of Hannibal Lechter’s leftovers, they’d hit a long forgotten colonial era graveyard. I guess this happens a lot, especially in relatively crowded and long-populated England. I saw on TV where they were excavating the graveyard of a “hopsital” from the time of the Black Death. You couldn’t get infected by the plague from such an excavation, could you?
John Knox, the Protestant reformer (and not a very nice guy, really), was buried in the churchyard of St Giles’ Cathedral here in Edinburgh. And not long ago, the council decided that rather than keep the graves of many great residents of the city of Edinburgh intact, they’d rather have a nice new carpark! John Knox’ Grave is now council carpark space nuber 44. He’s still in there, though.
