Cemeteries aren't just for ghosts — they're also a gold mine of history

Cemeteries have gotten a lot of attention over the past few days, with Halloween and Dia de los Muertos. But Jennifer Shaffer Merry enjoys being in cemeteries all year round, for the historical aspect.

And, she’s not alone. The Association for Gravestone Studies held its annual conference this summer in Denver, featuring discussions about preservation, the modernization of the 19th century American cemetery landscape and cemetery tours.

Merry is an archivist at the Arizona Historical Society, Pioneer Cemetery Association board member and chair of the Arizona Chapter of the Association for Gravestone Studies. She spoke with The Show about how she got into the field of studying gravesites and more.

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Full conversation

JENNIFER SHAFFER MERRY: Yeah, actually, so I’ve been a genealogist for most of my life, since I was in high school. And I started working on a cemetery in Ohio, actually, that my family was buried in, some ancestors. And I was really interested in some of the different aspects of why they were where they were and the religious affiliation of the cemeteries.

And there’s actually two of them half a mile apart. And so once I started visiting and seeing the disrepair that the cemetery was in, I got really interested in how we work with cemeteries. And so I kind of had an interest in law, in who owned that cemetery and finding out what we could do to do some repair there.

That never ended up happening, but it sort of led me to, “Well, I live in Arizona. What can I do here?” And it led me, me to our historic cemetery in downtown Phoenix, Fourteenth Street and Jefferson.

MARK BRODIE: What is the historical significance of cemeteries? Like, why is it important to a historian like yourself?

MERRY: The cemeteries really give you an idea of who lived here in the past. So you can get a lot of historical information just from knowing that they’re there, just from the location of where they’re buried. So, for example, in our cemetery, we have a lot of early military figures, we’ve got a lot of early political figures.

So just learning that they’re there and who they were, we can find out a lot about early Phoenix and how Phoenix was settled. And then there’s a lot of women and children that you may not know anything about other than their name and date that’s on that cemetery. So you start doing more research into them.

BRODIE: What sorts of things does the field of gravestone studies focus on? Like, what do we hope to learn from this kind of work?

MERRY: Yeah, so the main association that I belong to, the Association for Gravestone Studies, Pioneers’ Cemetery Association, also is a member. They started in the ’60s, and early scholars were really focusing on Puritan, sort of New England cemetery markers and more of the iconography. And that’s a big part of the field, is the iconography and what you can learn from symbolism on the stones themselves.

But there’s also anthropology, archaeology, the patterns of burials. You can study just the art itself. There’s a lot of folks that are interested just in art. And we have people that are interested in the spiritual and supernatural kind of things. You’ve got the ghost hunters and things like that that are interested in cemeteries.

But it’s really a lot of different — my interest is the preservation. I really like to do the hands on work. I like to do making sure that these last so that other people can study them.

BRODIE: You mentioned the art. And obviously gravestones typically have the name and the date of birth, the date of death, maybe like a word or phrase about them. But what kind of art tends to be involved here?

Jennifer Shaffer Merry

MERRY: So obviously back east, like I said, the Puritans, there’s a lot of meaning in the artwork on their stones because you’re talking about an illiterate population. So they told a story about that person, their beliefs, a lot of things more modern or later 1800s, 1900s stones, especially here in Arizona. You get a lot of iconography that’s either about mourning, so you’ve got flowers and things like that that represent religious beliefs or resurrection, things like that.

Or you might have fraternal orders. That’s a big one that we have. So there were thousands of different fraternal orders that people belonged to, women and men. So you’ve got your Masons, the IOOF, the International Order of Odd Fellows, Woodmen of the World is another big one that we have. And all of these organizations had some kind of either insurance benefit for their members, so they would pay for them to be buried.

And so most people wanted everyone in the afterlife to know, or everyone after they died to know that they were a member of this organization.

BRODIE: Is there ever controversy about what ends up on a gravestone?

MERRY: Always. Modern times, it seems to be — I like to read the news articles from all over about anything to do with cemeteries. I’m kind of weird like that. But there’s a lot of stuff that you’ll see about almost homeowners association kind of patrolling of cemeteries. You don’t want something too big that it overshadows somebody’s plot next to them.

I remember reading something about a Spongebob Squarepants that someone had put for their deceased child, and it was too big and it was an “eyesore” for the other folks around it. And so, yeah, there’s always some kind of drama when it comes to either the size or the looks or people put too many things on them.

A lot of cultures have different sorts of meaning behind what they place on a grave marker. Some people don’t like that. They think it looks trashy. So, yeah, there’s all kinds of drama that you can get into. Lots of people have different beliefs on what a cemetery should be and what they want to see when they come to see their deceased.

BRODIE: Does it seem as though there’s a different sense of what should be on a gravestone in different communities, different cultures, different parts of the world? Not just the art, but maybe the information, the inscriptions on it sort of describing the deceased?

MERRY: Absolutely, yeah. Every culture has their own ways that they want to be remembered. So I think that there’s all kinds of different things that you can see. And if you go through different religious, specific religious cemeteries, you’ll see a lot of different. You know, for example, in some of the Jewish cemeteries, you’ve got Hebrew inscriptions.

Sometimes you’ve got pieces out of the Torah. You’ve got different inscriptions for different religions, ethnic backgrounds. And everyone’s got traditions. So they might put something different on their stone based on a tradition that was for their group.

BRODIE: What are some of the more interesting things that you have seen on gravestones during your time in cemeteries?

MERRY: Oh, gosh. There’s a lot of different carvings that are fascinating to me. And I really do love the different fraternal orders because there’s so many different ways that they show their symbolism. Some of the orders have thousands of different ways to show that they were a member of that particular group. There’s a couple of the really big ones.

And I usually tell people when I’m doing classes, if you see some kind of acronym that you don’t know what it is, it’s probably a fraternal order. It’s probably nothing more than just figure out what that stands for — probably something in Latin — and figure out what group that belonged to.

BRODIE: What do you like about being in old cemeteries?

MERRY: It’s very peaceful. And the history of the garden cemetery in the United States is fascinating to me because we went from burying your family in your backyard or on your farm or wherever to these great big, enormous — especially back East — ornately big trees, lush, actual boards of horticulturalists having something to do with the planning of the cemetery.

And making it just a real peaceful place to now where we actually use them as places for recreation. So we have events in cemeteries, and that’s not unusual.