New and Improved Edition

Someone asked me recently what I look for when I do research in a cemetery. That's one of the things that makes looking at gravestones so interesting. You never know what you might find on them. Some give nothing more than the person's name and years of birth and death. But often a stone will give more detailed information. It might give you the names of a person's parents, a woman's maiden name, marriage date, name of a child who died young, number of children, family genealogy, or any number of variables.

Here are a few amusing stones I came across on the FindAGrave website.

John Denby DDS

"I'm filling my last cavity"

Bristol County, Rhode Island

Monroe county, Florida

Paul G. Lind (apparently a Scrabble fan)

Multnomah County, Oregon

Here are a few other unusual epitaphs of the famous and non-famous.

Arabella Young, 1771

Here lies as silent clay

Miss Arabella Young,

Who on the 21st of May

Began to hold her tongue.

(Hatfield, Massachusetts)
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Grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania
Who was fatally burned March 21, 1870

by the explosion of a lamp filled with

"R.E. Danforth's Non-Explosive Burning Fluid."

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Alexander the Great

A tomb now suffices for him

whom the world was not enough

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Quoth the Raven,"Nevermore."

Edgar Allan Poe

(Westminster Presbyterian Cemetery; Baltimore, Maryland)

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...If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea....

Anne and Charles Lindbergh (Palapala Hoomu Congregational Cemetery; Kipahulu, Maui, Hawaii)

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And here is my favorite:

The Body of

B. Franklin, Printer

Like the Cover of an old Book

Its Contents turn out

And Stript of its Lettering & Guilding

Lies here. Food for Worms

For, it will as he believed

appear once more

In a new and more elegant Edition

corrected and improved

By the Author

Benjamin Franklin

(Christ Church Burial Grounds; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

I don't know if you have ever given any thought to what you would want on your memorial stone, but I have. The genealogist in me would want my maiden name included. And I want this verse which is my statement of faith. "But thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." Death is not the end of life. Our Lord Jesus Christ won the victory over death and because He lives I shall never die. I know without a doubt I shall reappear in a new and more elegant edition, corrected and improved by the Author. Thanks be to God who makes it possible!