Developing a Tour

I've been avoiding writing this post because I know it's going to be all over the place, a real jumble. But I finally had to admit that this is part of the process, so here it is.

Each tour guide at Laurel Hill Cemetery designs and researches a signature tour, based on their specific interests and the stories they want to tell. Finding your voice by finding your topic can be a challenge.

My personal academic background has developed into something I feel very passionate about - the influence of clothing and textile production on societies, making me a Textile Anthropologist. While my specialty concentrates on Coptic Egypt, before the year 1,000 CE, I wanted to consider translating that interest into my signature cemetery tour.

But how to proceed?

Should I discuss the residents of Laurel Hill who were involved in fashion and textiles? Possibly.  I should at least include Martha Drinnan was identified in death by the dress she was wearing. But I am really more interested in common people and the clothing they wore. And finding the stories of the non-"famous" people in Laurel Hill.

How could I know what clothing people were actually buried in? Couldn't, really.

Maybe I could track mourning clothes throughout the time periods of the cemetery.

Hmmmm...

Most information you find kind of jumbles Victorian mourning clothes into one large lump, but fashion changes rather quickly.

I could try to find a timeline of Victorian mourning fashion and conventions and attach burials to the various changes in fashion. But I couldn't find such a timeline.

Which  means making my own timeline. Newspaper and journal accounts, advertisements that possibly even give prices for various gloves, crepe, veils, mourning dresses, etc.

Doable, given my academic background.

Hmmm...

I could just pick random burials based on death date and match them to dates when fashions changed (mostly based on newspaper and journal accounts, perhaps advertisements. That could work.

To test the process, I picked a random death year of 1875. Then went on Find a Grave to find any burials at Laurel Hill dated to 1875.

If you haven't seen Find a Grave, you definitely want to go on over there and play! You can search by name, by dates, by cemetery. It's a genealogist's dream. Since one of the people responsible for it (Russ Dodge, a wonderful tour guide at Laurel Hill - if you ever see him advertised giving a tour, TAKE IT!!) is a specialist in the Civil War, it is especially helpful for that. You can add your own family's graves, as well. I found my family stone, "WILD", and we even found my husband's father's grave and learned that he served in Korea. Check it out -  https://www.findagrave.com/.

So I pick a name, LTC Frank A. Reynolds (buried in Section L, Lot 27-28). Born August 10, 1841 in West Virginia and died July 19, 1875 in Ilion, Herkimer County, New York. He was a confederate soldier - so that's an interesting thing about him. Both of his parents died in 1876. Since I have his burial section and lot location, I will be able to get more information about him from the files in the cemetery archives, if there is any information there. That's for further down the road.

Oddly, both of his parents died a year after his death, 1876. That will take some looking into, as well.

So now the trick is to find information about mourning practices in 1875. That might include what kind of veils women wore and for how long (years? months? changing as time goes on?), the size of a black band on a male relative's hat, did they wear gloves, etc.

Here are some photos of mourning dresses from 1875:

  

      

1875 Mourning Dress from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection (front and back)

Mourning Dresses circa 1875 from "Morbid Portraits" from the Daily Mail, October 30, 2017

A possible process!

But how to communicate these photos and examples of fashions to my guests? Large reproductions on foam board? Maybe a handout that they can take as a memento of their time on the tour? Turn that handout into a pamphlet that could be sold in the cemetery shop? 

Hmmm...

So many possibilities, and as you get more into the development process, some ideas will be dropped and some ideas will stay and some ideas will lead in other more interesting directions.

I'll be back on this topic as I come up with more of those ideas. And, of course, help me out and leave a comment with your suggestions!