From coffin-making to undertaking: the rise of the funeral directing industry in the 1880s
Date
1992
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This thesis examines the manner in which undertakers moved from merely providing coffins for the dead to developing the full service industry of funeral directing during the late nineteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, an undertaker might provide coffins for the deceased only as a sideline to his other business and offered no other services. By 1900, the undertaker handled all necessary preparations for interring a corpse--from picking up the body, embalming and laying the body out, providing a coffin, purchasing the cemetery lot and digging the grave, coordinating and staffing the funeral, and providing grief counseling for mourners--and called himself a "funeral director." This thesis traces the development of the funeral directing industry in Baltimore during the pivotal decade of the 1880s, when many of the changes took place. The study uses primary source materials of daybooks, account books, artifacts, and advertisements in City Directories to examine the work of both a rural and an urban undertaker.