Writing Prompt – Headstone

I have seen a lot of talk of funny tombstones and long epithets, but in general the tombstones I see are pretty similar. Occasionally an older one will list how someone died or list them as the husband or wife of someone or another, but in general they list pretty much the same information.

This leads me to wonder about the person who wrote the epithet and the person who engraved it. Maybe they are the same person. What lead to that being written and why did everyone go along with it or did they.

Of course if this was my tombstone I stated a few days ago that there is very specific information I would want on my tombstone. My full name, first, middle, and last and clear birth and death dates. Basically anything that would be useful to a genealogist. I have been studying my family history since I five, although at five I was mostly just reading information other people had collected so my dad could enter it into the computer. So for me, as long as that info was on there, I would probably be fine.

When my dad died there were a lot of things I didn’t care about. It was important to me that his obituary listed the names of certain people and not just counted them and it was important that the tombstone had my mom’s maiden name on it. Since it had Mom’s maiden name we also put Dad’s nickname. I didn’t want to lose him and I don’t want to lose Mom for a long time, but that was what the situation was, so I wanted to make sure the information I wanted when researching was there for other people to find about my family if they ever researched us.

I’m not really sure what might be written on this headstone that the dead dislikes so much or perhaps like me it would be about what wasn’t written there. What do you want on your tombstone and is there anything you don’t want on there?

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CommentLuv badge

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.