by B.L. Unkel | Oct 31, 2020 | History
Have you ever visited a cemetery and just walked around reading the headstones? If you know what to look for, they can tell you a story. First—and most obvious—what is written on the headstone? Is there more than just the person’s name, birth, and death dates? Next,...
by B.L. Unkel | Oct 24, 2020 | History
One of my favorite cemeteries in the Nashville area is the Nashville City Cemetery. It’s the “oldest continuously operated public cemetery in Nashville.”1 It opened on January 1, 1822, and by 1850 contained over 11,000 graves of people from every race, religion, and...
by B.L. Unkel | Oct 17, 2020 | History
As I said last week in Did You Know You Can Be Alive and Still Be Pronounced Dead? people in years past had a genuine fear of being buried alive. The fear of that happening, called taphophobia, hit its peak in the Victorian era (apx. 1820-1914). Prior to embalming...
by B.L. Unkel | Oct 10, 2020 | History
Literally, the night after I wrote Did You Know You Don’t Have to Die to Be Buried? I read an article about a Detroit funeral home whose morticians found the corpse recently delivered to them wasn’t a corpse at all. She was breathing. EMS arrived—questioning the call,...
by B.L. Unkel | Oct 3, 2020 | History
We’ve all heard: “Kids say the darndest things.” Well, here’s a story from my family. Years ago, when two of my sisters and two of my young nieces were visiting me in Tennessee, I was playing tour guide, showing them all things family-related—old homeplaces,...
by B.L. Unkel | Sep 11, 2020 | History
More than half a century ago, a Texan was appointed governor of the U.S. Territory of Guam. The island faced a number of problems, one being how to deal with crop-destroying snails. The man the governor had appointed as his Agricultural Secretary, a friend and fellow...
