Understanding Scottish Graveyards
Understanding Scottish Graveyards
Betty Willsher
Publisher: National Museums of Scotland
ISBN: 9781901663969
Pages: 96pp.
Illustrations: 30 b-w line drawings and 36 photographs
Size: 6 1/2 x 7 5/8inches
Paperback
* will delight amateur genealogists, social scientists, and historians as it encourages preservation of old graveyards, important today as many of the stones are fast disappearing.
* from the standing stones and cairns of the Neolithic and Bronze ages and the early Christian graves to the European traditions that have marked death and church burials.
There are three main chapter headings -- Graveyards, Types of Monuments and Recording and Studying Graveyards. Among the subjects -- burial places of nobles and common folk, burial costs, customs inside and outside the church, memorials for plague victims, landscaped Victorian cemeteries, and marking descriptions to help the amateur and professional genealogist. Captions explain ideas about mortality (ie, the hour-glass, angel of death, snakes), immortality (torches, heart, snake, caduceus) and the trades (ie, coal-masters, millers, fleshers [butchers], soldiers, ministers). Anecdotes enliven the telling.