Description: A rich survey of folk practices prior to mortuaries and the funeral industry
Brief description: Abby Burnett is an independent researcher who, as seen in the Arkansas Educational Television Network's 2010 documentary Silent Storytellers, studies such things as long-lost burial customs, tombstone symbolism, epitaphs, and the work of early stone carvers. She is author of Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850-1950, published by University Press of Mississippi. She has written entries on graveyards, stone carvers, and early medicine for the online CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, in addition to doing public speaking on all aspects of burial in Arkansas, her adopted state for the past forty years.
Review Quotes: This painstakingly researched and thoroughly engaging book is as much an anthropological and sociological study as it is a historical and folklorist account of death, dying, and burial in the Arkansas Ozarks, covering our part of the country as well as James K. Crissman did Central Appalachia. Including references from legendary Ozark folklorists Otto Rayburn, Vance Randolph, and Mary Celestia Parler, there is virtually no source of information that Burnett hasn't explored--epitaphs, business ledgers, funeral home records, obituaries, WPA questionnaires, health department regulations, oral history interviews, ministers' journals, censuses, mortality schedules, doctors' notes, undertakers' record books, historic photographs, museum collections, and newspaper accounts. Importantly, the book also documents the more difficult to find death-related customs practiced by African Americans in the Ozarks. An enjoyable read and helpful reference, this is a book sure to be quoted and referenced for years to come.--Allyn Lord, director, Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, Springdale, Arkansas