This may be a repost, but in my area all of the funeral homes seem to be run by two families. Is this a required practice, or just common coincidence?
Thanks.
Um, coincidence. All of the local ones are just one family (or more likely used to be one family and got taken over by a conglomerate.)
I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that I’m confident that no jurisdiction requires a monopoly or near-monopoly in the funeral home business.
In some cases the post of mortician/undertaker is a family “tradition” (it must be hell when Junior goes off the rails and wants to be a physician).
In my neighborhood, most of the funeral homes with 2 family names are the result of mergers or buyouts of two originally separate businesses. The original family names are kept or hyphenated together because customers like them having the traditional name.
There are also large corporations that buy up and operate many funeral homes. They too generally continue to operate under the traditional family name.
What, no mention yet of Gateman, Goodbury, and Graves? 
I work with business credit data. I’ve noticed that the primary business names for some cemeteries and funeral homes is a certain corporation, and the DBA names are ‘traditional’ names. I’ve written a program that does my data cleanup for me, so I haven’t actually seen the companies recently. ISTR that they were along the lines of ‘Funeral Home Holding Corp’ or something like that. (NB: I made the name up, just to illustrate the ‘kind’ of name.)
Service Corporation International is the largest funeral conglomerate in the world, and they usually keep the traditional name on the building, mainly because
-
They want people to think it’s still the neighborhood funeral parlor, and keeping the name is keeping the good reputation built up over the years.
-
If the sign suddenly changed overnight to McMortuary Corp., people holding pre-need contracts are going to freak.
SCI operates funeral homes in L.A. bearing names of former owners that have been gone for decades, like the Pierce Brothers chain. AFAIK, there is still just one Pierce brother around, but he works somewhere else.
In Ohio, at least, the funeral home must be in the name of the funeral director; you cannot name it “Superior Funeral Services” or somesuch.
As funeral homes are so often family business and, as t-bonham@ssc.net notes, mergers are common, you’ll get Jones Funeral Home merging with Smith Funeral Home to be Jones-Smith Funeral Home. Then they’ll buy out Johnson to be Jones-Smith & Johnson. If Jones dies or retires, they can keep the name and according goodwill as long as either Smith or Johnson (or any of their same-named descendants who go into the business) runs the place. Then they can merge with Brown and be Jones-Smith, Johnson & Brown and keep the different permutations running literally forever as long as just one person in the company name is licensed and running the place.