My husband Walt has told me that his grandmother was one of those women in her rural community who prepared the deceased for wakes and burial. She helped bathe and dress the body, laid out on the family’s dining room table. It was then usually arranged on a “cooling board” or an unhinged door laid across two chairs in the parlor for viewing. He remembers wakes in homes in rural Georgia into the 1950s.

The idea of hands-on preparation of the dead for burial is foreign to us now when people who have died are whisked away to funeral parlors for preparation, visitations and burial or cremation. But Tim Drake of Anderson County, South Carolina, has collected a treasure trove of information on antebellum burial customs and regularly gives talks on the subject.

“It’s not a good dinnertime presentation,” he said with a laugh. Drake, who is state entomologist for South Carolina and assistant director of regulatory services at Clemson University, is a history buff and a collector of old things that he says represent the only tangible vestiges of the forefathers of this country.

A lot of funeral and burial customs were born of necessity, said Drake. If a person died in the summer, it was necessary to bury him within two or three days at most because of decomposition. In winter, the body could be held longer. Everything was handled at home because funeral parlors didn’t come into being until cotton mill times around the 1880s, because the mill houses didn’t have a parlor a body could be laid out in.

One of the greatest fears was the possibility that a person could be buried alive. Holding the body out until it started to decompose or change color was a sure way to know a person was dead. Holding a mirror under the nose to see if it fogged up was not so reliable, especially if that person was in a deep coma.

In the summer, a body was placed in front of an open window and draped with cheesecloth to discourage blow flies, since there were no window screens. Big pennies or silver dollars were often used to weight the eyelids down. Some families have coins passed down and used over and over for that purpose, Drake said.

The Irish, Scots and Germans all had strong superstitions about funeral traditions. The body had to be carried out feet first to keep that deceased from looking back and calling others to join him in death. Often when someone died, others in the family died, too, but from pathogens people didn’t understand at the time.

Victorian customs regarding mourning dress were elaborate. By 1830, upper class women were held to strict mourning codes that dictated that widows wore only black for a year with no jewelry and nothing showy. In the second year, a widow could wear dark colors but trimmed in black. In times of war when families lost so many, some women stayed in mourning for years. Drake said women wore black to appear as a shadow so the departed spirit could not call them back.

When some of those women in mourning died, it was said they died of a broken heart, but Drake said they likely died from arsenic poisoning from the mordants used to set the black dye and the contact of the fabrics with the skin.

Men were expected to observe mourning only for six months and then could get remarried, which was merely practical because a man would need to bring someone into the household to look after his children.

In Victorian times, postmortem photography of children was popular so family members could save an image of that child. Chances are, said Drake, if people have a picture of a young child from that time the baby was already dead. If you look closely, he said, you can see that the child is tied in a ladder-back chair. When the photo was processed, the photographer would retouch the eyes to make them appear open.

Photos of live children usually show telltale blurry parts because young children could not sit still for the time required for photos to be made in that time.

To some, discussions of funeral customs might be morbid. But to Drake, it’s all a part of historic lore that needs to be preserved.

This is the opinion of Carole Currie. Contact her at 828-658-1914 or carolecurrie@charter.net.

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