{"id":4661,"date":"2012-07-08T23:57:09","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T03:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/?p=4661"},"modified":"2012-07-08T23:57:09","modified_gmt":"2012-07-09T03:57:09","slug":"crossing-a-cultural-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/crossing-a-cultural-divide\/","title":{"rendered":"Crossing a Cultural Divide"},"content":{"rendered":"

If we could take a trip back in time it would be very much like a visit to another culture.\u00a0 Cultures are living entities and like families and the individuals that comprise them cultures change.\u00a0 What was common, acceptable, even expected and lauded 100 years ago may well be unacceptable and even a bit nauseating to us today.\u00a0 Sometimes change is good, sometimes it is bad, and sometimes it is just different.<\/p>\n

An old photograph can take us on a journey to another culture.\u00a0 I took such a journey recently thanks to a photograph I received from the Willamette Heritage Center<\/a>.\u00a0 I have already written about the journey this photograph took to find me,<\/a> now I am writing about where the photograph has taken me.<\/p>\n

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William F Martin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This photograph caught my eye because, in our modern world, it is quite macabre.\u00a0 It is a photo of a beautifully dressed child in a stroller. It looks fairly normal at first, but the child is dead.<\/p>\n

The child is William F. Martin.\u00a0 He was born in August of 1877 in Muskegon, Michigan and he died there in September of 1881 of “congestion of the lungs”.\u00a0 He was one of six children born to William Martin and Rosa Cleantha Blood.\u00a0 One of his older sister’s was my husband’s grandmother. What drove them to take their dead child, dress him in his best clothes, put him in a life-like pose and have this picture taken?\u00a0 The answer is custom.\u00a0 Postmortem photography was quite common in the Victorian Age, for both children and adults.\u00a0 An early photographer’s advertisement said, “secure the shadow, ere the substance fade”.\u00a0 Securing the shadow slightly after the substance had faded became the custom.\u00a0 Adults were generally pictured in bed or in the coffin, but children were posed, often with their families. Here is another example from Stanley Burn’s Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America<\/span>.\u00a0 These are two postmortem daguerreotypes of the same child.<\/p>\n

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Another oddity of Victorian mourning is\u00a0 jewelry fashioned from the deceased’s hair.\u00a0\u00a0 These pieces might just be a lock of hair encased in glass or truly elaborate necklaces and bracelets of woven hair.\u00a0 A bit repulsive to us , but a declaration of love and loss to those who wore it.<\/p>\n

Here are two examples.\u00a0 Both are made of human hair with gold embellishments.<\/p>\n

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The young William Martin lived in a time when people did not die in order as we expect today.\u00a0 Most of us expect to bury and mourn our parents, but not our children.<\/p>\n

It has been said that in times when medicine was mostly useless and death was common that life was cheap and the pain of loss less deeply felt. Anyone who has wandered through an old cemetery and read the tender inscriptions on the tiny tombstones or considered the photographs and jewelry on this page will be forced to a different conclusion.<\/p>\n

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Thanks to the Willamette Heritage Center for the use of the picture of William Martin, their catalog number P 2012.011.0023<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If we could take a trip back in time it would be very much like a visit to another culture.\u00a0 Cultures are living entities and like families and the individuals that comprise them cultures change.\u00a0 What was common, acceptable, even …<\/p>\n

Crossing a Cultural Divide<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[57,234,248],"class_list":["post-4661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-martin-family","tag-martin-genealogy","tag-willamette-heritage-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4661"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4711,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4661\/revisions\/4711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}