Victorian Era Monument Trends at St. Stephens Cemetery

Today in class we had a guest speaker who created the St. Stephens data base we worked on early this semester. Angela, had two main research questions that were important to her study of the St.Stephens cemetery: the first question was are Victoria era monument trends found at St. Stephens Anglican cemetery? and secondly, are there any differences between child and adult monuments? 

Angela focused on documenting monument types, inscriptions, and measurements. She made the data base which our class used earlier this semester consisting of monuments with relevant historical information for community reference and analysis. Next, she created an interactive plot map with pictures of monuments and inscriptions for community reference and analysis and then turned her information into an internet blog. 

This is important to look at in regards to our theme of Kinship this past week because many of the monuments found in the St. Stephens cemetery are family graves or small individual monuments. She found that by looking at monument imagery and epitaphs she could find out symbolic meaning about individuals and the type of kinship they had. She found that many of the children's monuments had pictures of  stars, lambs, and gates to heaven. She found that most children's monuments were small half-sized monuments, not full sized monuments or they were buried with their families. Angela also noticed that the epitaphs had very interesting messages some of there were rude and blunt stating "liar" and others had religious meaning or victorian era inscriptions. 

She found that working with such a small data set (only 55 monuments) and scarcity in literature on her topic made it difficult to make final conclusions. She felt that more work in Victorian era church cemeteries was needed to get a better understanding. This was interesting to learn more about because it gave me a better understanding as to why the dataset we used was chosen. It made me think of potentially doing my own research further on in my academic career.