Celestina Sommer ~ The Islington Murderess

Born 1 July 1827, daughter of William Christmas, a silver smith and dealer and his wife Elizabeth (nee Smith). She was baptised at St. Giles without Cripplegate church on 19th

July, 1829.  She was the fourth of eight children from a respectable family of silversmiths in the north London borough of Islington. An accomplished pianist and teacher of music, she performed regularly at the famed St Martin's Hall, Covent Garden as a member of the greatly respected and hugely popular John Hullah school of music. 

During the spring of 1845, Celestina discovered she was pregnant. She was unmarried and due to the social shame her family would bear for an illegitimate child, after telling her parents about the baby, she went on to make arrangements for her baby to be fostered out of the family, as a means of avoiding social shame.

She duly gave birth to a daughter Marion Celestina who was baptised at St. John's Church, Hackney on 27th January, 1846 before being handed to foster parents - Thomas & Julia Harrington, they raised her as one of their own children.

Over the next 10 years, she made regular payments (of her father's money) to the Harringtons for the upkeep of her daughter, but in 1854 she had married a German immigrant (Karl) Charles Sommer, who worked as a silver engraver for her father's business.

After her marriage, Celestina's father then expected his daughter's husband to continue with the regular payments he had been making for his granddaughter's upkeep. This enraged Charles Sommer and it caused arguments between him and his new wife.

On 19th February, 1856 Celestina arrived at the Harrington home - this time not to make her maintenance payment, but to remove her daughter. She informed Julia Harrington that her husband had now refused to make any further payments as the child was not his, so she intended to take her daughter to live elsewhere.

An argument ensued, in which Julia Harrington insisted the child should stay with her. She implored her to leave the girl with the only family she had known, but Celestina was adamant and she dragged the crying child away with her.

On returning to the home she shared with her husband Charles Sommer at 15  Linton Street, Islington, she dragged her daughter down into the basement, where she proceeded to cut her throat. The child died almost instantly. She was buried on a cold February morning a few days later.

After a trial in which questions of her sanity were raised, Celestina was finally convicted of the willful and brutal murder of her daughter, and sentenced to death.

This was later reprieved to transportation and changed again to life imprisonment. Huge public outcries over whether she was insane or just a brutal murderess abounded.

Celestina spent the next three years moving from one prison to another - first to Newgate and then to the lunatic asylum Fisherton House near Salisbury, Wiltshire. Her health was failing fast in the often squalid living conditions of the prison system. She died from an apparent "stroke" at the age of 31.

John Babbacombe Lee ~ The Man They Could Not Hang

John "Babbacombe" Lee (c. 1864 – 19 March 1945) was an Englishman famous forsurviving three attempts to hang him for murder. Born in Abbotskerswell, Devon, Lee served in the Royal Navy, and was a known thief.

In 1885, he was convicted of the murder of his employer, Emma Keyse, at her home at Babbacombe Bay near Torquay on 15 November 1884 with a knife. The evidence was weak and circumstantial, amounting to little more than Lee having been the only male in the house at the time of the murder, his previous criminal record, and being found with an unexplained cut on his arm. Despite this and his claim of innocence, he was sentenced to hang. Having survived three attempts at hanging, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He became popularly known as "the man they couldn't hang".

Attempted execution and aftermath

On 23 February 1885, three attempts were made to carry out Lee's execution at Exeter Prison. All ended in failure, as the trapdoor of the scaffold failed to open despite being carefully tested by the executioner, James Berry, beforehand. The medical officer refused to take any further part in the proceedings, and they were stopped.

Berry provides a detailed account of the failed execution in his memoirs, My Experiences as an Executioner, noting that the trapdoor was adjusted with a saw and axe between the attempted executions, although in Berry's memoirs and letter to the Under-Sheriff he only mentions two attempted executions.

As a result, home secretary Sir William Harcourt commuted the sentence to life
imprisonment. The Home Office ordered an investigation into the failure of the apparatus, and it was discovered that when the gallows was moved from the old infirmary into the coach house, the draw bar was slightly misaligned. As a result the hinges of the trapdoor bound and did not drop cleanly through. Lee continued to petition successive Home Secretaries and was finally released in 1907.

The only other man in history known to have survived three hanging attempts was Joseph Samuel, in September 1803.

An alternative theory, raised by Ernest Bowen-Rowlands in his book In the Light of the Law,suggests that the trap was blocked by a wooden wedge that was inserted by a prisoner working on the scaffold, and removed when the apparatus was tested. Note that Bowen-Rowlands only cites an anonymous "well-known person", citing an equally anonymous prisoner confession, and this would contrast with Berry's reputation (noted by prison governors and surgeons) as a meticulous professional.

Later years and identifications

After his release, Lee seems to have exploited his notoriety, supporting himself through lecturing on his life, even becoming the subject of a silent film. Accounts of his whereabouts after 1916 are somewhat confused, and one researcher even speculated that in later years there was more than one man claiming to be Lee. It was suspected that he died in the Tavistock workhouse sometime during the Second World War. However, more recent research concludes that he died in the United States under the name of "James Lee" in 1945. According to the book The Man They Could Not Hang, Lee's gravestone was located at Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee in 2009.

Alice Maud Hartley ~ Slayer of Nevada Senator Murray D. Foley

Alice Hartley (first married name) was convicted in 1895 of killing Nevada State Senator Murray D. Foley by gunshot in 1894. She was sentenced to eleven years but had served only two when she was pardoned.

She was born in England in 1864. She testified that she was married and had one child there. She came to the United States and married a silver prospector and miner named Henry Hartley in the Meadow Lake district of Nevada County, California in 1886.

Her husband died in late 1893, after which she moved to San Francisco, California where she exhibited three oil paintings and six watercolors during the spring exhibition of the Hopkins Institute of Art. In March 1894 she exhibited at the California Midwinter International Exposition in the same city.

Mrs. Hartley then moved to Reno, Nevada in October 1893 and rented a studio on the third floor of the Bank of Reno, where she offered art lessons and painted portraits.

She told investigators and testified in court that she was approached by Senator Murray D. Foley, the bank president, who visited her in her studio and insisted that she drink some liquor with him, drugged brandy and bénédictine, she said. She took a sip and he persuaded her to drink it all. She lost consciousness, awoke once and passed out again. She awoke again at 5 a.m. and he was still there.

She testified that Foley knocked at her door "several times on different nights afterward," and on February 25 she went into her room to find him inside. He kissed her violently, picked her up and threw her on a couch, where she lost consciousness again.

She found she was pregnant and insisted that he "acknowledge the paternity of the child and put it in writing. He said he would, but there must be no witnesses." On July 26, he visited her room and threatened to strike her, seizing a chair as a bludgeon. She took a pistol hidden on a shelf behind a curtain and shot him twice.

Mrs. Hartley was indicted by the Washoe County grand jury in August 1894 and went on trial the next month before an overflowing crowd of spectators. The all-male jury found Mrs. Hartley guilty of second-degree murder, with a recommendation of mercy. She was sentenced to eleven years in prison.

On November 16, 1894, she gave birth to a boy, whom she named Vernon Harrison Hartley.

Petitions both for and against the sentence were presented to the State Board of Pardons. It met on June 3, 1895, and turned down her bid for freedom. On June 18 she and the baby were taken to the state prison in Carson City, where they were assigned to two adjoining rooms and she was given the privileges of a trusty.

In January 1897 the State Board of Pardons granted her a full pardon on the ground that the shooting was justified in that Foley had "wronged her," that she had been sufficiently punished and that she had a child to raise.

Mrs. Hartley then proceeded to file a suit for one-half of Foley's estate, valued between $2 million and $8 million, on behalf of their son. Testimony began on November 24, 1896, in Carson City. A jury reported it stood 8 to 4 in favor of Mrs. Hartley, but could not reach a valid agreement, and the case was headed for a retrial when news came that the little boy had died of scarlet fever.

Mrs. Hartley carried on the case as the heir to her son, but in June 1897, a judge declared that her testimony was not valid and she was declared not of interest to the estate, which at that point was estimated to be only $100,000.

Mrs. Hartley was in the news again when she interrupted a service at the Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco to stand and declare that she had a message concerning Theodore Durrant, who at that time was being tried for murdering two women whose bodies were found in the church two years earlier. She said that God had told her that Durrant was innocent and that his life should be spared.

Ushers and others escorted her from the church, where she was surrounded by passers-
by and a policeman investigated, but Mrs. Hartley hurried away.

Alice Maud Hartley remarried William S. Bonnifield of Winnemucca, Nevada, in San Francisco on January 4, 1899.

Mrs. Hartley died in Denver, Colorado, on December 28, 1907. 

Jenny Diver a.k.a Mary Young ~ Notorious Irish Pickpocket

Jenny Diver's real name was Mary Young but she was re-christened by her gang as she was such an expert "diver," as pick pockets were known at the time. For simplicity, I have called her Jenny Diver from hereon in. She was a professional criminal who became something of a celebrity, ending her career swinging from London's Tyburn Tree on Wednesday, the 18th of March 1741. It is thought that she was about 40 years old at the time of her death, although there is no precise record of her date of birth.

Jenny was born around 1700 in the north of Ireland, the illegitimate child of Harriet Jones, a lady's maid. Harriet was forced to leave her job, as was normal at the time, and found lodgings in a brothel where she gave birth. She soon deserted Jenny who lived in several foster homes before, at about the age 10 years, she was taken in by an elderly gentlewoman. She was even sent to school, where she learned to read and write and mastered needlework. Her quick fingered dexterity fitted her well for her future life of
crime. Her sewing was excellent and she was able to earn a reasonable sum from it. So much so that she decided to go to London and become a professional seamstress. There was a small problem, however, how to raise the money for the ferry boat fare. She solved this by persuading one of her admirers that she would marry him if he found the money and went with her to England. He booked a passage on a ship bound for Liverpool. A short time before the vessel was to sail, the young man robbed his master of a gold watch and 80 guineas and then joined Jenny, who was already on board the ship. The crossing of the Irish Sea took two days and Jenny was very seasick. She and her young man took lodgings in Liverpool and lived together for a short while as man and wife. When Jenny had recovered sufficiently, they booked the journey to London by road. The day before they were due to leave Liverpool, her companion was arrested for the thefts in Ireland. Jenny sent him his clothes and some money before she departed, and he was returned to Ireland to stand trial. He was sentenced to death but this was commuted to transportation, as it was his first offence.

Once in London, Jenny met up with another Irish girl, called Anne Murphy, who offered her a lodging in Long Acre. Anne was in fact the leader of a bunch of pickpockets and introduced Jenny to the trade. As an apprentice pickpocket, she was given 10 guineas on which to live until she could start producing income herself. She was taken by members of the gang to suitable venues to observe their techniques and to practice lifting purses and jewellery. Jenny learned very quickly and was clearly going to be an asset to the gang. In fact she was so successful at crime, that she was soon making a fortune and took over from Anne as head of the gang who renamed her Jenny Diver. Anne and some of the other members often acted as servants to her in her various scams.

Jenny's typical method of operation is described in the Newgate Calendar as follows:

"Jenny, accompanied by one of her female accomplices, joined the crowd at the entrance
of a place of worship in the Old Jewry, where a popular divine was to preach.  Observing a young gentleman with a diamond ring on his finger, she held out her hand which he kindly received in order to assist her.  At this juncture, she contrived to get possession of the ring without the knowledge of the owner, after which she slipped behind her companion and heard the gentleman say that as there was no probability of gaining admittance he would return. Upon his leaving the meeting he missed his ring, and mentioned his loss to the persons who were near him, adding that he suspected it to be stolen by a woman whom he had endeavoured to assist in the crowd; but as the thief was unknown she escaped".

Not only was Jenny nimble fingered but she was also extremely inventive. She was an educated, attractive and smartly dressed young woman who could mix easily in wealthy middle class circles, without being suspected of being a thief. The story is told of how she went to a church service wearing two false arms which appeared to remain in her lap. Dressed in good clothes and sitting among the wealthier lady worshippers, she would wait her chance to seize their watches and jewellery, passing them to one of her assistants in the pew behind. Apparently to her victims, her hands had never moved throughout the prayers.

Another successful ruse was to fake sudden illness when in the midst of a crowd. This she did in St. James' Park on a day when the King was going to the House of Lords. As she lay on the ground apparently in great pain, surrounded by people offering her assistance, she was systematically robbing them and passing the items backs to other members of her gang who were masquerading as her footman and maid.

Jenny also went on expeditions with her boyfriend of the day, who was presumably one of the gang members. In one of these adventures, she used the sudden illness ploy again but this time to gain access to a house in Wapping. While the owners went upstairs for smelling salts, etc., Jenny rifled through the drawers and helped herself to a considerable sum in cash. Her boyfriend was doing the same in the kitchen, helping himself to the best silver cutlery.

Jenny and her gang rapidly achieved notoriety and inevitably she was caught, for picking the pocket of a gentleman in early 1733. She was committed to Newgate and came to trial at the next Sessions of the Old Bailey charged with privately stealing, under the name of Mary Young, her real name, although she used many aliases. As this was her first recorded offence as Mary Young, her death sentence was reduced to transportation to Virginia on America's east coast. She spent four months in Newgate, awaiting a prison ship.  When the day finally came, she had a huge quantity of goods put aboard the ship with her, to enable her to fund a good life style in Virginia.

No doubt she used some of her wealth to bribe the captain to allow her to take all this and again the governor of the penal colony, when she arrived there to let her live well and not have labour in the plantations.

It would seem that she missed both the excitement of crime and the easy wealth she made from it because it was not long before she returned to Britain. Only 5% of those sentenced to transportation for periods of less than life did return and to do so before completing one's sentence, was a capital crime. However, Jenny was able to use her looks and money to persuade a returning captain to take her back to London.

She returned to her various forms of thieving, but she was getting older now and her fingers were stiffening with arthritis. Life expectancies were far lower in the 1730's than now and people aged more quickly due to the hard life of the time. On April the 4th of 1738, Jenny, by now aged 38, was caught red-handed with two male accomplices trying to take the purse of a woman named Mrs. Rowley in Canon Alley, near London's Paternoster Row. This time she gave the name of Jane Webb and under this name, once more got off with a pardon on condition of transportation.

Remember there were no photographic or fingerprint records at this time so the authorities had to accept the name she gave and seemed unable to unearth her previous conviction and sentence. Had they been, she would have almost certainly been hanged. It would seem that journalists of the day had no such problem making the connection between Jane Webb and Jenny Diver and her true identity was reported by London Evening Post. Members of her gang made every effort to save her from transportation, but on the 7th of June 1738 she was once more put aboard a prison ship, the "Forward" again bound for America. Jenny did not learn from this and within a year, using her usual method of bribery, she landed back at Liverpool.  She made her way to London but her old gang had dispersed - retired, transported or hanged. Jenny was finding it much harder now to make the good living she had been used to in her younger days.

The crime for which she was to hang.

Nemesis finally overtook Jenny on Saturday, the 10th of January 1741 when she was caught trying to rob a purse containing 13 shillings and a halfpenny (a fraction over 65p) from a younger woman, Judith Gardner, in Sherbourne Lane. Jenny had set up a scam with Elizabeth Davies and an unidentified male member of her gang, whereby he would offer to help ladies cross some wooden boards laid over a patch of wet ground. As he held Judith's arm out, Jenny put her hand into the woman's pocket. Judith realised this and grabbed Jenny's wrist still within her pocket. Jenny hit her round the head but she maintained a firm grip on Jenny's cloak until passers by managed to arrest her and Elizabeth. A constable was summoned and they were taken to the compter (a local lock up jail). Their male accomplice managed to escape.

Committal proceedings and trial.

She was examined the next day by the magistrates, who committed her to Newgate to await trial. This time she was identified by the authorities and appeared before the next Sessions for the City of London and County of Middlesex at the Old Bailey, a week later on Saturday, the 17th of January 1741. The judges for this Session were the Lord Mayor, the Right Honourable Humphry Parsons, the Lord Chief Justice, Baron Probyn, Mr. Justice Wright, Mr. Justice Fortescue, Sir John Strange, the Recorder of the City of London and finally Mr. Sergeant Urlin, the Deputy-Recorder.

She was charged, together with Elizabeth Davies, with highway robbery in the form of "privately stealing" (picking pockets to the value of more than one shilling - 5p in our money) and in Jenny's case for returning from transportation. She had been caught red-handed so had no real defence to the first charge and equally little to the second. Her trial, before an all male jury, would have typically occupied no more than two hours. The principal prosecution witness was the victim, Mrs. Gardner, who described the attack on her to the court and was cross examined on her testimony by Jenny herself. Mrs. Gardner told the court how she had been put in fear by the attack and how she had struggled with Jenny. Several other witness gave evidence of the crime and subsequent arrest of the two women. There was no counsel for the defence in those days but Jenny did her best to defend herself and brought forward character witnesses for both herself and Elizabeth Davies, not that these convinced the jury of 12 men who brought her and Elizabeth in guilty, to use the parlance of the time. At the end of the Session, the Recorder sentenced them both to be publicly hanged at Tyburn. In all, 13 prisoners were sentenced to death.  From this Sessions, seven men and six women. Both Jenny and Elizabeth immediately "pleaded their belly," i.e. claimed that they were pregnant but the panel of matrons charged with examining them found this not to be the case. Elizabeth had her sentence commuted to transportation, but in view of Jenny's past record, there could be no hope of a reprieve. She was thus returned to Newgate and lodged in the Condemned Hold to await her fate. At the end of the Sessions, the Recorder prepared his report to the King and Privy Council recommending who should be reprieved and who should hang.  Predictably, Jenny’s name was not on the reprieve list. 

It seems that the enormity of her situation and the lack of any hope of reprieve finally hit Jenny and she turned to religion. Religion and repentance were very important at this time and even criminals like Jenny would have become very concerned about the afterlife and the fate of her soul. She would have been repeatedly told that if she confessed and repented her sins, then she could avoid going to "eternal damnation in the fires of Hell," or some similarly emotive phrase. As will be seen, she clearly took this message to heart. On her last Sunday, she and her fellow condemned prisoners were taken to the chapel and seated in the Condemned Pews where they were made to endure a church service with a coffin centrally placed on the table in their midst.

On the eve of an execution, the bellman of the Parish of St. Sepulchre's would ring his bell outside of the cells of the condemned and recite the following prayer:

All you that in the condemned hole do lie,
Prepare you for tomorrow you shall die,
Watch all and pray: the hour is drawing near
That you before the Almighty must appear;
Examine well yourselves in time repent,
That you may not to eternal flames be sent.
And when St. Sepulchre’s Bell in the morning tolls
The Lord above have mercy on your souls.

Executions at Tyburn.

At this time, there were potentially eight hanging days a year at Tyburn to correspond with the eight Assize Sessions at the Old Bailey.  In this year, there were in fact only five hanging days, December 1740 and January 1741, prisoners being held over until March 1741.  Anything up to 200,000 people would turn out to watch the procession to Tyburn and/or the actual hangings. The gallows at Tyburn consisted of 3 tall uprights joined at the top with beams in a triangular form under which three carts could be backed at a time, containing up to 24 prisoners, eight under each beam.

Executions were seen as tourist attraction as this extract from "The Foreigner's Guide to London" of 1740 shows: "The rope being put about his neck, he is fastened to the fatal tree when a proper time being allowed for prayer and singing a hymn, the cart is withdrawn and the penitent criminal is turned with a cap over his eyes and left hanging half an hour". The Guide warned: "These executions are always well attended with so great mobbing and impertinences that you ought to be on your guard when curiosity leads you there."

Wednesday, the 18th of March was to see one of the largest multiple hangings at Tyburn for many years, it was not until the 1780’ this many persons were hanged in London at one time. The prisoners had been convicted at the December 1740, January 1741 and February 1741 Sessions and had not been recommended for clemency to the King and Privy Council in the Recorder's Report at the end of the Sessions. Typically most of those executed would either be second time offenders or guilty of several offences. First time offenders were often reprieved for the sort of crimes listed below. In all 16 men and four women were to suffer that day. It should be noted that highway robbery was the official designation for crimes such as pick-pocketing and mugging on the public highway as well as for the crimes that we would normally associate with highwaymen.

Jenny's hanging.

On the morning of her execution, Jenny, being wealthy, dressed in a long black dress with a black bonnet and veil. Many of the women hanged at this time would wear a cheap linen shift as it was all they could afford and in any case, their clothes would become the property of the hangman afterwards. A few prisoners of both sexes would elect to wear their best clothes. Jenny was led from her cell to the Press Yard in Newgate, accompanied by the tolling of the bell of St. Sepulchre's Church just across the road. The Yeoman of the Halter tied her wrists in front of her and put a cord around her body and elbows. He put the noose around her neck and wound the free rope around her body. At this point, her nerve failed her for a few moments but she soon recovered her composure. Jenny was allowed to go to Tyburn in a Mourning Coach, attended by the
Ordinary (prison chaplain) of Newgate, the Reverend Boughton, to whom it was reported that she confessed her sins and declared her religious beliefs. A Mourning Coach was the 18th century equivalent of a modern funeral car. It was a black horse drawn enclosed coach and the horses too would have been decked out in black cloth. Wealthy and famous criminals like Jenny were permitted to hire a Mourning Coach for the journey to Tyburn to protect them from the crowds and also probably to enhance their image in the minds of the public. Attitudes towards execution were very different then, they were seen more as a gruesome entertainment than as the final act of justice by most ordinary people, unless the criminal was a notorious murderer.

The other 19 criminals to hang that day were similarly treated and then led to the eight execution carts and seated on their coffins. The first cart conveyed Quail, Legrose, and Huddle; the second, Nash, Sheriff, and Elver; in the third were Middleton, Mahon, and Fox; in the fourth, Hunt, Birch, and Davis; in the fifth, Tims and Lipscomb; in the sixth, Parsonson and Cassody; in the seventh Brabant, Catt, and Stracey; with Jenny’s Mourning Coach bringing up the rear. The procession was guarded by a file of Musketeers with their bayonets fixed to their firelocks, and two of the Light Horse with their swords drawn. After the Coach came eight more of the Light Horse, and about forty armed foot soldiers.

Like anybody else about to suffer an imminent and painful death, Jenny was no doubt inwardly terrified of what was about to happen to her, but she had to maintain her image and put on a "good show" for the crowd. Then as now "celebrities" have always captured the public's imagination and she would have expected to justify her celebrity status!

The journey to Tyburn, some two miles, could often take three hours or more to complete so it was usually around noon or later by the time the prisoners arrived. The procession comprised marshalmen, javelin men on horseback and constables armed with staves, all led by the City Marshal and Under Sheriff on their horses. The route led west out of the City of London, along Holborn, St Giles, and the Tyburn Road (now called Oxford Street) to the gallows at what is now Marble Arch at the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park. Extraordinarily as it seems to us now, the procession could make at least two refreshment stops where the prisoners were allowed to have food and alcohol, before reaching Tyburn. The first was at the Bowl Inn in St Giles, the second at the Mason's Arms in Seymour Place.

Once at Tyburn, Jenny was helped down from the coach by the Rev. Boughton and took her place in one of the carts. It is probable that the four women would have been placed in the same cart and the 16 men divided up between the other two carts. The hangman, John Thrift, uncoiled the free rope from around her and threw the end up to one of his young assistants lying on top of one of the three cross beams, who secured it leaving very little slack. This process had to be repeated for each prisoner, so took some while to complete. She may well have slipped John Thrift a small bribe to ensure he did his job well and positioned the knot under her left ear instead of at the back of her neck. At this time, the prisoner's legs were not pinioned. When all the "sufferers," as they were known at the time, were secured to the beams and had finished their prayers, night-caps were drawn over their faces and the signal given by the Under Sheriff for the carts to be whipped away by their drivers. Jenny did not require a night cap, instead preferring her veil. As the cart moved from under her, she dropped just a few inches and was brought up with a jerk, causing the noose to tighten around her neck. Swinging back and forth under the beam, she would have made choking and gurgling sounds, her feet paddling in thin air and her body writhing in the agonies of strangulation. Jenny was fortunate, however, and only struggled for a few moments before going limp and passing into unconsciousness, according to contemporary reports. It is not known whether Jenny's friends pulled on her legs to shorten her suffering, although this was a common practice. It is reported that some of the spectators offered up prayers for her soul as she dangled there. She had arranged for her friends to claim her body when she was cut down to prevent it falling into the hands of the dissectionists and was buried, at her specific request, in St. Pancras Churchyard.

Faithful Pastor Struck by Lightning

Rev. John Taylor was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland in 1754. It is not known when he came to the United States. He married Susanna Woodruff, the widow of William Huston, a Revolutionary officer.

Rev. Taylor was originally a member of the Presbyterian Church and in the United States became a convert to Episcopalianism. He was ordained a deacon on October 12, 1794 by Bishop White. Rev. Taylor journeyed West to Washington County, Pennsylvania in the vicinity of King's Creek around 1800 and established a church and school.

Rev. Taylor left Washington County, Pennsylvania in 1800 and went to live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to answer a call to service at Trinity Episcopal Church. Rev. Taylor's school work was largely at the Pittsburgh Academy which was the first institution of higher learning in the village. In October 1801, Rev. Taylor opened a night school on his own account in some of the rooms of the Pittsburgh Academy. On January 10, 1803, he separated from the Academy and began conducting a school in his residence at the corner of Market Street and Fifth Avenue. In 1807, he was again teaching at the Pittsburgh Academy.

Rev. Taylor left his charge at Trinity Episcopal Church in 1818, but continued to baptize, marry, and bury people in Pittsburgh and its vicinity for many years afterward. He continued this work until 1829 when he was seventy-five years of age. The continued call for his services was perhaps due to the fact that he had no immediate successor at Trinity Church. From 1818 to 1824, Trinity Church sometimes had a rector, but often times had none. He had also endeared himself to many both in the Church and out of it, who went to him whenever a clergyman was required.

Rev. Taylor was an avid astronomer and had more than a local reputation. It is related that he loved the study of astronomy so well that he sometimes spent the entire night in observing the movement of the heavenly bodies. One of his sources of income was to furnish astronomical calculations first for Zadok Cramer's Almanacs, and later for the Western Farmer's Almanacs. The last almanac for which he furnished calculations was the Western Farmer's Almanac for 1839 which appeared after his death.

Following his wife's death in January 1829, Rev. Taylor made his home with his son-in-law, Mr. John Irwin, in Allegheny , and passed the summers with his step-daughter, Sally Huston, who had married Mr. Thomas Limber, and lived with her husband on the banks of the Little Shenango Creek, three miles east of Greenville, Pennsylvania.

Rev. Taylor died on August 10, 1838, at the age of eighty-three years, nine months at the home of Mr. Limber. His death was tragic. For some years before, at daily worship, he had prayed that his death might be sudden, "so that his body might not be racked with pain nor scorched with fever." He was on one of his usual summer visits. The hot August air had been charged with electricity. Then the storm burst, the thunder roared and the lightening flashed, and at midnight Mr. Limber's house was struck, and its victim was Rev. Taylor. His prayer was answered.

He lay at rest, only a few yards from where he met his death, in the small burial plot on the Hadly Road, in a corner of the farm where he died.

Obituary information obtained from:

Rev. John Taylor - The First Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church of Pittsburgh and His Commonplace Book by Charles W. Dahlinger

Published in Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine by the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania ~ Volume 1, Number 1 - January 1918

Ludicrous crimes that would have gotten you hanged in 18th century England

Ash Woods
Sep 6, 2018

If you were living in England in the 18th century, you could be hanged for all these offences. From 1688 to 1815, law makers in England introduced the death penalty for a myriad of offences in a bid to deter property loss. Poaching of deer, stealing of rabbits, looting from shipwrecks, pickpocketing… every page of the statue book dripped with the threat of the hanging noose.

By 1800, there were over 220 property-related crimes in the English criminal law that were punishable by death. George Savile said “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.”
Historians referred to this era of criminal law as the “Bloody Code”.

The Bloody Code

“Every page of our statue book book smelt of blood. We hanged for everything — for a shilling — for five shillings — for forty shillings — for five pounds! We hanged for a sheep — for a horse — for cattle — for coining — for forgery — even for witchcraft — for things that were and things that cannot be.”

— Charles Phillips, 1857

Capital crimes in the Bloody Code included cutting down of young trees and blackening your face at night.

In 1723, the British parliament passed the Black Act which sentenced to death anyone who was found with a blackened face in a forest or a hunting ground. The Black Act also criminalised anyone who fish, hunt or destroy trees in the these locations. People could also be executed if they set fire to corn, hay, straw or wood in the area. In total, the Black Act added the death penalty to over fifty crimes.

These laws was passed in response to a gang of poachers based in Hampshire and Windsor Forest. They would hunt deer with blackened faces to avoid being identified. A short while after the law was passed, seven such poachers known as the Waltham Blacks were caught and hanged.

As the death penalty was introduced to even more criminal acts over the years, the multitude of capital crimes soon became staggering and incongruous.

In a Letter to His Excellency Patrick Noble, Governor of South Carolina, On the Penitentiary System, German-American jurist Francis Lieber pointed out the inconsistency of the laws:

“He who steals from my pocket a handkerchief above a value of twelve pence shall, according to the letter of our law as it stand on the book, atone with the forfeiture of his life.

But the thief who steals from a jeweller’s shop a most costly article, is punished with whipping and imprisonment only, while at the same time a petty theft from a booth or tent in a market or fair by breaking in, is punishable with death.

Robbing a bank at night time by breaking into the building is not a capital offence, but the second conviction of horse stealing is.”

The Reluctant Jurors
In practice, the judiciary administrators were not unaware of the harshness of the Bloody Code. They would find ways to circumvent some of the laws. Jurors would be reluctant to pass a guilty verdict when the punishment was the death penalty. Judges would reduce the severity of the crime so that the accused no longer faced the prospect of hanging. Death sentences were commuted to exile or deferred.

In 1750, Ann Flynn was accused of stealing a shoulder of mutton from a butcher. She admitted to the theft, but pleaded that she had resorted to stealing in order to feed her two young children. Her husband was ill and he had been out of work for three months. The jury was sympathetic. She was sentenced to a fine of only one shilling, which the jury paid. The prison officer gave Flynn a shilling before she left.

In 1763, John Cox was on trial for stealing 6lb of sugar. The jury, on hearing that Cox was in dire straits and that his wife and five children were suffering from small pox, recommended mercy and collected money to help Cox’s unfortunate family.

Still, despite these spotlights of mercy, the law was the law. People in pre-Victorian times had been sentenced to death for reasons we would find appalling today. From stealing twelve pence to finding malice in a child, here are some of the shocking things that people could be hanged for in 18th and early 19th century England.

Stealing More Than 12 Pence
Stealing more than 12 pence (or one shilling) could get you the death sentence.

Though historical currency conversion is a notoriously fiddly matter, the UK Archives currency converter estimates that a shilling in mid-1700s is the equivalent of £5.83 in 2017. Imagine being sentenced to death for stealing anything that costs more than eight dollars!

In 1741, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Hardy from Norwich was sentenced to hang for stealing goods worth 13 shillings and 6 pence (around $100 today). Abandoned by her husband and alone in London, she had been driven to theft out of desperation. She was given a last minute reprieve at the gallows and her sentence was commuted to transportation instead.

Roderick Audrey was a young thief with a way with birds. At nine years old, he had mastered the art of training his pet sparrow to fly into London townhouses. He would knock on the door with tears in his eyes and beg the butler to let him in to retrieve his pet sparrow. Once he was inside, he would grab silver cutlery and stuff them down his pants. If he was seen before he could finish his thievery, he would run out of the house as if he was chasing his sparrow like the innocuous boy he appeared to be.

Audrey was so prolific at his stealing that country towns and villages within ten miles of London soon knew that the boy who played with the sparrow was a thief. Audrey’s luck ran out in his teens. In 1714, he was arrested and sentenced to hang at Tyburn. Unlike Elizabeth Hardy, he did not get a reprieve. Audrey was sixteen years old when his life ended.

Returning From Transportation
“Returning from transportation” refers to unlawful escape from exile. After 1615, it became common for criminals to be sentenced to exile to Australia, America or Africa for life or several years. Any deported convict caught returning to England before the expiration of their sentence risked being hanged.

Jenny Diver was one such person.

Her real name was Mary Young. Birthed as an illegitimate child by a lady’s maid, she was abandoned by her mother at a young age. She grew up in several foster homes in Ireland and gained a reputation as a skilled seamstress. She later emigrated to London and fell in with a gang of pickpockets. She was so skilled at stealing that she became the leader of the gang. She was nicknamed Jenny Diver for her exploits.

In one of her famed scams, she would dress up as a baroness and knock at the door of a great townhouse. Once the door opened, she would faint straight into the arms of the butler. The grand household would be stirred into a great panic as they fussed over the fainting noblewoman. Meanwhile, her sidekick disguised as her footman would ransack the house for valuables. Once her “footman” had looted the premises, Jenny would speedily recover, present her calling card to the overwhelmed mistress of the house, and leave the house flouncily with their silver plates and cutlery.

Jenny was also known to put on a custom-made dress with a fake pregnancy stomach bulge and false wooden arms. She would sit piously in church with the false arms over the stomach bump and pickpocket the people around her.

In 1733 and 1738, Jenny was arrested and sentenced to transportation twice. However, on both occasions, she bribed the captain of the ship to take her back to London. In 1741, she was arrested again. This time, she was indicted with returning from transportation, a capital crime.

She was sentenced to hang.

Because of her fame as a notorious criminal, she was taken to the execution grounds in a mourning carriage. It was reported that she went to her fate calmly in a black dress and a hat with a veil.

Strong Evidence of Malice in a Child
Children, specifically between the age of seven and twelve, could be sentenced to death if there was evidence of strong malice in them.

In 1629, a boy described as “an infant between eight and nine years” was hanged for setting fire to two barns. His name was John Dean. He was one of the youngest persons to be sentenced to death in England.

In the trial documents of Old Bailey, a note regarding the law specifies that

“An infant… seven years old, cannot be guilty of felony, whatever circumstances… may appear. 

If he be above seven years old, and under twelve years, and commit a felony… he is likely to be [judged] not guilty, because he is… not of [discretion] to judge between Good and Evil... 

...yet if if it appears by [strong] and pregnant Evidence and Circumstances, that he had [discretion] to judge between Good and Evil, Judgement of Death may be given [against him].”

Judges have applied this law using their discretion. In 1758, a woman was accused of receiving stolen goods from a young boy charged with shoplifting. When the judge learnt that the boy was only nine years old, he stated that “as the boy was not capable of distinguishing between good and evil, so no felony, and if no felony no accessory, wherefore they were both acquitted.”

English judge William Blackstone gave his appraisal of this law in his treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England.

He advocated that sparing a young criminal child “on account of his tender years might be of dangerous consequence to the public, by propagating a notion that children might commit such atrocious crimes with impunity, it was unanimously agreed by all judges that he was proper subject of capital punishment. But in all such cases, the evidence of that malice… ought to be strong and clear beyond all doubt and contradiction.”

In the case of eight-year-old John Dean, however, court notes recorded that jurors found the boy “upon Examination, that he had Malice, Revenge, Craft and Cunning, he had Judgement to be hanged, and was hanged accordingly..”

That was all we know of young John Dean in historical records. He was judged to have malice in him and he was hanged for it. Sadly, we will never know his story. His passing was a mere footnote in history.

How to Read a Hebrew Tombstone

*Information obtained from JewishGen InfoFile

Jewish tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions have an added value to genealogists, in that they not only show the date of death and sometimes the age or date of birth, but they also include the given name of the deceased's father.  This permits you to go back one more generation.

Here are a few helpful pointers if you cannot read Hebrew.

At the top of most Jewish tombstones is the abbreviation פּ'נ, which stands for po nikbar or po nitman, meaning “here lies”.

At the end of many Hebrew tombstone inscriptions you will find the abbreviation ת נ צ ב ה, which is an abbreviation of a verse from the Bible, the first book of Samuel, 25:29, “May his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life”.

If any Hebrew characters at all are written on a tombstone, they are most likely to be the person's Hebrew name.  A Hebrew name always includes a patronymic, the person's father's given name.  This is a unique feature of Jewish tombstones, and a great boon to Jewish genealogy.

The Hebrew word בן, ben, means “son of”, as in “Yaakov ben Yitzhak”, meaning “Yaakov, the son of Yitzhak”.  The Hebrew word בת, bat, means “daughter of”.  On tombstones, these words will often appear as ב'ר, an abbreviation for ben reb, meaning “son (or daughter) of

the worthy”, followed by the father's given name.  The word reb is a simple honorific, a title of respect, akin to “Mr.” — it does not mean Rabbi.

The Jewish Calendar

Dates are written in Hebrew according to the Jewish calendar.  This calendar, which starts its “year one” with the Creation of the World, was probably designed by the patriarch Hillel II in the fourth century.  He calculated the age of the world by computing the literal ages of biblical characters and other events in the Bible, and came up with a calendar that begins 3760 years before the Christian calendar.

Years:
The letters of the Hebrew Alphabet each have a numerical value, specified in the chart on the left.  When a Hebrew date is written, you must figure out the numerical value of each letter and then add them up.  This is the date according to the Jewish calendar, not the calendar we use in every day life, known as the Gregorian calendar (also referred to as the Common Era, civil or Christian calendar).  In September 2009, for example, the Jewish year was 5769.  Given a Hebrew date, you need to do only a little bit of math to change the Hebrew year into a secular year.

Often a Hebrew date after the year 5000 on the Jewish calendar will leave off five thousand.  For example, the Hebrew year 5680 will be written as 680 rather than 5680.  To compute the civil (Gregorian) year, simply add the number 1240 to the shortened Hebrew year.

Here's one example: If the year is written as תרפג, the letter ת is 400, the letter ר is 200, פ is 80, and ג is 3.  400 + 200 + 80 + 3 = 683.  The 5000 is usually left off, so the actual year would be 5683.  By using our formula, 683 plus 1240 is 1923.  That is the civil year.

Months:
The Hebrew year begins on Rosh Hashanah, which occurs on the Gregorian calendar in September or October.  Therefore, the dates listed for the months of Tishri, Heshvan, Kislev and sometimes Tevet must be read as applying to the preceding year of the civil (Gregorian) calendar.

Converting Calendar Dates:
The complete transposition of a Hebrew date to a Gregorian date uses a very complex formula.  It is easiest to simply refer to one of the published or online reference works, such as:

The Comprehensive Hebrew Calendar, 5703-5860, 1943-2100, by Arthur Spier (Jerusalem, New York: Feldheim Publishers, 1981); or 150 Year Calendar, by Rabbi Moses Greenfield (Brooklyn: Hotsaat Ateret, 1987).

Most synagogues and Jewish libraries possess one of these works.  Another alternative is to use one of several computer programs: JCAL, Hebcal, Tichnut; Steve Morse's “ Jewish Calendar Conversions in One Step”; or JewishGen's online JOS calculator (https://www.jewishgen.org/jos).  These programs can convert Hebrew to Gregorian dates and vice versa, as well as display calendars and Yahrzeit dates for any year.
For more information about the Jewish calendar, see the JewishGen InfoFile Introduction to the Jewish Calendar.

Some Hebrew Phrases

In addition to names and dates, here are the common Hebrew words which appear on tombstones:

Here lies po nikbar
                                                                                

Son of                  ben

Daughter of         bat

Title, i.e. "Mr." reb, rav    

Son/Daughter      ben reb
of the honored 
                                                                             

The Levite ha-levi

The Cohen           ha-kohen

The Rabbi ha-rav
                                                                              

Dear, Beloved (masc.) ha-yakar

Dear, Beloved (fem.) ha-y'karah
                                                                              

Father                  av

My father            avi

Our father          avinu

Mother                eem

My mother         eemi

Our mother         emanu

My husband        baali

My wife               ishti

Brother               akh

My brother          akhi

Our brother         akhinu

Sister                   akhot

Aunt                    dodah

Uncle                   dod
                                                                             

Man                                      ish

Woman                                ishah

Woman (unmarried) b'tulah

Woman (married "Mrs." marat

Old (masc., fem.) zakain, z'kaina
   
Child (masc., fem.) yeled, yaldah
   
Young man/woman bakhur, bakhurah
                                                                                           

Died (masc., fem.) niftar, nifterah    

Born (masc., fem.) nolad, noldah    
                                                                                         

Year, Years                            shanah, shanim    

Day, Days                             yom, yamim    

Month                                   khodesh

First of the month rosh khodesh
                                                                                          
 
Hebrew Abbreviations on Tombstones:
There are many many different Hebrew abbreviations that are found in tombstone inscriptions and Hebrew literature.  Abbreviations are usually indicated by a quote mark or an apostrophe.  Often, the apostrophe is used to abbreviate a single word, whereas the quote mark indicates an abbreviated phrase.  For more information, see the following works:

“Hebrew Abbreviations for Genealogists”, by Edmund U. Cohler, Ph.D., in Mass-Pocha (Newsletter of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston).
    - Part I: IV,1 (Winter 1994/95), pages 4-7.
    - Part II: IV,2 (Spring 1995), pages 14-18.
    - Part III: IV,3 (Summer 1995), pages 16-17.

Hüttenmeister, Frowald Gil.  Abkürzungsverzeichnis hebräischer Grabinschriften.  (Frankfurt am Main: Gesellschaft zur Forderung Judaistischer Studien in Frankfurt am Main [Society for Furthering Judaic Studies in Frankfurt am Main], 1996).  349 pages.  {Frankfurter judaistische Studien, Volume 11.  In Hebrew and German.  Hebrew title: Otsar rashe tevot ve-kitsurim be-matsvot bate ha-almin}.  ISBN #3-922056-08-3.  OCLC 925532369.

“Reading Hebrew Matzevot Key Words, Abbreviations, & Acronyms”, compiled by Dr. Ronald D. Doctor. (June 2008).  21 pages.  http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~orjgs/Abrrev.pdf.

Symbols on Tombstones:
In addition to the inscription, symbols on the tombstone can be clues.

Two hands, with four fingers each divided into two sets of two fingers, is the symbol of a priestly blessing — this signifies a Kohen, a descendant of the biblical high priest Aaron.

A pitcher signifies a Levite — in ancient days, members of the tribe of Levi were responsible for cleaning the hands of the Temple priest.

A candle or candelabra often is used on the tombstone of a woman; and the six-pointed Star of David on that of a man.

A broken branch or tree stump motif on a tombstone often signifies someone who died young, whose life was cut short.

Bibliography:

• Kurzweil, Arthur.  From Generation to Generation: How to Trace Your Jewish Genealogy and Personal History.  (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).  Chapter 9, pages 342-358.  OCLC 823528084.
• DOROT, The Journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society (New York):
    - XI, 2 (Winter 1989-90), pp 2-3: “Getting the Most Out of Your Cemetery Visit”.
    - XI, 4 (Summer 1990), pg 16; and XII, 1 (Autumn 1990), pg 8: “Tools of the Trade”.
• Krajewska, Monika.  A Tribe of Stones: Jewish Cemeteries in Poland.  (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1993).  242 pages.  {Mostly illustrations}.  OCLC 925571139.
• Rath, Gideon.  “Hebrew Tombstone Inscriptions and Dates”, in Chronicles (Newsletter of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Philadelphia), Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1986), pages 1-4.
• Schafer, Louis S.  Tombstones of Your Ancestors.  (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1991, 2007).  160 pages, paperback.  {Doesn't deal specifically with Jewish tombstones}.  OCLC 233523010.
• Schwartzman, Arnold.  Graven images: Graphic Motifs of the Jewish Gravestone.  (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993).  144 pages.  OCLC 891405959.
• Strangstad, Lynette.  A Graveyard Preservation Primer.  (Nashville, Tenn.: Association for Gravestone Studies, 1988, 1995, 2013).  126 pages.  OCLC 1007570142.
• Association for Gravestone Studies, 278 Main Street, Suite 207, Greenfield, MA 01301.   (413) 772-0836.   {Produces a quarterly newsletter, Markers, and access to a lending library.}   https://www.gravestonestudies.org.
• Caplan, Judith Shulamit Langer-Surnamer.  “Tombstone Translation Topics: How to Decipher and Read a Hebrew Tombstone”.  In: 19th Annual Conference on Jewish Genealogy: Syllabus.  (New York: Jewish Genealogical Society, 1999), pages 217-221.   Also In Jewish Genealogy Yearbook 2000 (20th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, Salt Lake City, IAJGS, 2000), Section 1, pages 80-84.

Links:
International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) Cemetery Project:
    · Inventory of Jewish cemetery locations worldwide.
    · http://www.iajgsjewishcemeteryproject.org.

JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR):
    · Database of three million Jewish burial records, from 7,800 cemeteries in 128 countries.
    · https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery.

Jewish Cemeteries in the New York Metropolitan Area (JGSNY):
    · List of Cemeteries  ·  Map  ·  Travel Directions  ·  Burial Societies.

Copyright ©1996, 2001, 2013 by Warren Blatt.
JewishGen InfoFile Index JewishGen Home Page

Edmond J. Safra Plaza | 36 Battery Place | New York, NY 10280
646.494.5972 | info@jewishgen.org | © 2019, JewishGen. All rights reserved.

History of Gravestones UK

People say that things go in and out of fashion, but gravestones have long been a traditional way to serve as memorials to our loved ones.

Memorials and gravestones now come in all shapes and sizes that are decorated in a variety of religious symbols or other decorative designs, but the purpose has remained the same.

Here we take a look at the history of gravestones, discuss what the first gravestones were and how gravestones have changed from their early beginnings.

The first gravestones
Gravestones, or grave markers as they were more commonly known, are believed to date back as far as 3,000 B.C. to the Roman and Celtic cultures.

The markers were megalithic monuments and unlike today were used to mark an entire burial chamber rather than a single grave.

In earlier times cemeteries did not exist and people instead had burial plots near their homes where all their family members would be buried together.

Although the first gravestone has not been confirmed, the Mail Online reported back in 2013 that scientists found the first evidence of floral tributes on graves was found at a 13,700-year-old prehistoric burial site in Israel.

Churchyard burials evolve
According to an article on the International Southern Cemetery Gravestones Association, once churchyard burials began to become popular in the 1650s, gravestones began to become more widespread.

Tombstones and monuments made from slate or sandstone were put up to commemorate the deceased and from this point inscriptions were carved on the slate.

The beginning of inscriptions
In the 19th century the importance of gravestones to honour the dead increased and this is where inscriptions began to become more widespread.

Gravestones now started to include a few words about the deceased by loved ones or friends. Information included details about date of birth, date of death and the name of the deceased.

During the Victorian era, which is 1837-1901, more elaborate monuments and gravestones began to appear and popular materials included marble, wood, iron and granite.

Gravestones for all classes
During the Victorian era poorer people began to commemorate the dead with memorials and gone were the days where only the upper class could afford to commemorate the deceased.

The creation of war memorials
Today people can travel to countries such as France to see the beautiful war memorials that mark the lives of all the brave soldiers that sadly lost their lives, but when did war memorials begin to appear?

In Glasgow and Salford there are monuments that remember the Crimean War, which dates back to 1853-1856. The take-off point for war memorials, however, began following the Boer War in 1899-1902.

After the Boer War, statues and monuments were erected to celebrate the lives of soldiers from districts who were killed during the bloody battle.

This has since led to war memorials being created for the First World War, Second World War and other wars since.

Memorials have become more extravagant
Since the beginning of the humble gravestones, where a number of stones were used to show where a deceased person lies to rest, modern gravestones have developed to include the likes of memorial vases, plaques and kerbed memorials.

Monuments remembering large-scale tragedies have also developed, with the World Trade Center Memorial in New York a stunning example that was built to remember the casualties from 9/11.

~Information obtained from AKLander blogpost.

History of Gravestones

Gravestones are also known as grave markers, headstones, and tombstones. In earlier times when there were no cemeteries, people used to have burial plots near their family homes.

These graves were usually marked with rough stones, rocks, or wood, apparently, as a way to keep the dead from rising.

They were mostly marked with the deceased’s name, age, and year of death. Gradually, churchyard burials evolved involving large, square-shaped tombstones prepared from slate (1650-1900) or sandstone (1650-1890). The inscriptions carved on slate used to be shallow yet readable.

Public cemeteries evolved in the 19th century. Eventually, people started giving importance to the gravestones, headstones, footstones, etc. as a means to memorialize the dead.

Thus, they started engraving the headstones with a small epitaph or a few words about the deceased whether written by the individual himself or by someone else. Plus, they bore details like the date of birth and date of death of the departed loved one.

The greatest advantage of this tradition is that by reading the inscription on a gravestone, one can derive information about the deceased and trace out his or her family history.

Alexander Pope, for instance, eulogized Sir Isaac Newton with the following couplet:
“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”

The Victorian era (1837-1901) greatly emphasized customs and practices associated with death. So, the period paved way for elaborate tombstones and headstones. The cemeteries appeared more like parks as they had such lavish and decorated gravestones.

In addition, the gravestones also included sculptured designs, artwork and symbols such as:

• angels of death
• star of David
• the Dove
• Egyptian symbol Ankh
• Eye of Horus
• weeping willow tree
• maple leaf
• flowers
• horseshoe
• sword
• broken column

These symbols denoted religious beliefs, social class, occupation, and several other aspects of the life of the deceased.

Unlike these, most tombstone symbols from the Colonial period reflected fear of afterlife as they believed that only a few people would be allowed in the Heaven after death and the rest would be categorized as sinners.

Check out some styles of gravestones popular from 1800-1900 here. Moreover, you can visit this page to find out more about Victorian cemeteries and funeral monuments.

Besides, you can get information about History of Government Furnished Headstones and Markers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs website.

Interestingly, in the 18th century, there emerged a short-lived burial practice of covering the graves with iron cages (mortsafes).

This strange practice, though, died out by the end of the Victorian era. The most popular materials for gravestones during this era were marble (1780-1930), granite (1860-untill date), iron, and wood.

Earlier, gravestones were used only by the middle and upper classes. However, after the emergence of the new Protestant theology, even lower classes started using grave markers for commemorating the life of a departed loved one.

The term gravestone, by the way, emerged from a Jewish custom in which the visitors to a grave used to place stones at the head as a way to honor the deceased.

This custom, in turn, was inspired from an incident wherein a Jew broke the Sabbath in order to write a note so as solve a crime.

Later, he felt guilty for the act, even though it was necessary. Thus, after thorough contemplation, he decided that his grave should be ‘stoned’ after his death. So, the tradition of placing stones on a grave became popular.

~Information obtained from International Southern Cemetery Gravestones Association

The Deadly 1911 Heat Wave That Drove People Insane

Source: Natasha Frost / The History Channel

In July 1911, along the East Coast of the United States, temperatures climbed into the 90s and stayed there for days and days, killing 211 people in New York alone. At the end of Pike Street, in Lower Manhattan, a young man leapt off a pier and into the water, after hours of trying to nap in a shady corner. As he jumped, he called: “I can’t stand this any longer.” Meanwhile, up in Harlem, an overheated laborer attempted to throw himself in front of a train, and had to be wrestled into a straitjacket by police.

In an age before air conditioning or widespread use of electric fans, many struggled to cope with this multi-day deadly heat. June had been easy enough, but a sweep of hot, dry air from the southern plains suppressed any relief from the ocean breeze. In Providence, Rhode Island, temperatures rose 11 degrees in a single half hour. New York City and Philadelphia became sweltering centers of chaos, while all across New England, railway tracks buckled, mail service was suspended and people perished beneath the sun. Total death tolls are estimated to have topped 2000 in just a few weeks.

Though temperatures never quite broke 100 degrees in the first two weeks of July in New York, the city was poorly equipped to handle the heat, and the humidity that went with it. Poor ventilation and cramped living spaces exacerbated the problem, ultimately leading to the deaths of old and young alike, with children as small as two weeks old becoming overcome by the heat.

In the peaks of the wave, people abandoned their apartments for the cool grass of New York’s public spaces, napping beneath trees in Central Park or seeking shade in Battery Park. In Boston, 5,000 people chose to spend the night on Boston Common rather than risk suffocation in their own homes. Babies wailed through the night—or failed to wake up at all.

The streets were anarchic: People reportedly ran mad in the heat (one drunken fool, described by the New York Tribuneas “partly crazed by the heat,” attacked a policeman with a meat cleaver), while horses collapsed and were left to rot by the side of the road.

Around July 7, when temperatures returned to ordinary levels of July sweat, the humidity remained high. It was this, reported the New York Times, that was responsible for so many of the casualties, “catching its victims in an exhausted state and killing all of them within the hours between 7 and 10 a.m.” The New York Tribunephrased it still more dramatically: “The monstrous devil that had pressed New York under his burning thumb for five days could not go without one last curse, and when the temperature dropped called humidity to its aid.”

Outside of New York, however, temperatures had climbed higher still. In Boston, people

struggled in 104 degree heat; in Bangor, Maine and Nashua, New Hampshire, it reached a record-breaking 106. In Woodbury, New York, a farmer left his field when the outside temperature hit 140 degrees—hot enough to melt candle wax. People didn’t just die from exhaustion or heat stroke, but from their efforts to escape the sweltering air. Some 200 people died from drowning as they dove head first into the ocean, ponds, rivers and lakes.

City authorities did what they could to handle the heat, including flushing fire hydrants to cool off streets. In Hartford, Connecticut, people rode around on free ferries and trolleys, trying to catch some kind of a breeze, while a local brewer donated water barrels to parks. Factories were closed and mail delivery was suspended as transport went haywire: boats oozed pitch and railways buckled in the heat. “The tar surface on some streets is boiling like syrup in the sun,” reported the Hartford Courant, “making things sticky for vehicles as well as pedestrians.”

At the end of the first week, even a terrific thunderstorm did little to alleviate the discomfort. In New York, the Times reported, it was simply a few showers “accompanied by much thunder, which rumbled as early as 5:45 a.m., giving promise of big things, and then disappeared into the ocean.”

In Boston, the storm had disastrous consequences, damaging already charred property throughout the town and killing those who strayed into its path. A second thunderstorm, around the 13th, finally brought temperatures back down to manageable levels. As it did so, however, five more people died from lightning strikes. The record-breaking heat wave was over, but at still greater cost for the exhausted, grieving people of New England.

Source: 

https://www.history.com/news/heat-wave-1911-weather-insane

The 18th-Century Craze for Gin

by Mark Forsyth ~ June 12, 2018

Inspiring oddities from mass public nudity to a mechanical gin-selling cat, the craze for gin swept across London and much of England during the first half of the 18th century. Writing for History Extra, Mark Forsyth, author of A Short History of Drunkenness, explores the history behind this alcoholic spirit.

Gin causes women to spontaneously combust. Or, at least, that was the theory. There are two documented cases of British ladies downing gin and going up in smoke, and a few more of European women doing the same with brandy. The matter was taken seriously enough to be discussed by the Royal Society in 1745.

We don’t take stories of spontaneous human combustion that seriously any more (for reasons I’ll get back to), but for a historian, the stories are fascinating because they’re part of the great Gin Panic. This was the moralising and serious counterpart to the great Gin Craze that swept London and much of England in the first half of the 18th century and produced (aside from the ignited ladies) mass public nudity, burning babies, and a mechanical gin-selling cat.

Alcoholic spirits were a pretty new commodity in 18th-century society, though they had actually been around for a long time. They started as a chemical curiosity in about the 10th century AD. They were being drunk by the very, very rich for pleasure by about 1500, as shown when James IV of Scotland bought several barrels of whisky. But even a hundred years later, in 1600, there was only one recorded bar in England that sold spirits to the curious (just outside London, towards Barking).

Then in about 1700, spirits hit. The reasons are complicated and involve taxation of grain and the relations with the Dutch, but the important thing is that gin suddenly became widely available to Londoners, which was a good thing for the gin-sellers as Londoners needed a drink. The turn of the 18th century was a great period of urbanisation, when the poor of England flocked to London in search of streets paved with gold and Bubbles from South Sea [the South Sea Bubble was a speculation boom in the early 1710s], only to find that the streets were paved with mud and there was no work to be had. London’s population was around 600,000. There were only two other towns in England with populations of 20,000. London was the first grand, anonymous city. There were none of the social constraints of a village where everybody knew everybody’s business. And there were none of the financial safeguards either, with a parish that would support its native poor, or the family and friends who might have looked after you at home. Instead, there was gin.

A craze among the poor
It’s very hard to say which was bigger – the craze for drinking gin that swept the lower classes, or the moral panic at the sight of so many gin drinkers that engulfed the ruling classes. Anonymous hordes of poor, often homeless people wandered the city drinking away their sorrows, and often their clothes, as they readily exchanged their garments for the spirit.

Before the industrial revolution and the rash of cotton mills that would fill the north of England a century later, cloth was very expensive. Beggars really did dress in rags, if at all, and the obvious thing to sell if you really needed money fast was, literally, the shirt on your back. The descriptions left to us by the ‘Gin Panickers’ would be funny – if they weren’t so tragic.

Indeed, the most notorious single incident of the gin craze was the case of Judith Defour, a young woman with a daughter and no obvious husband. The daughter, Mary, had been taken into care by the parish workhouse and provided with a nice new set of clothes. One Sunday, in January 1734, Judith Defour came to take Mary out for the day and didn’t return her. Instead, she strangled her own child and sold the new clothes to buy gin.

Judith Defour was probably mentally unwell anyway, but her case became a public sensation, because it summed up everything that people thought about the new craze for drinking gin: she was poor; she was a woman and she was a mother. Judith was selling clothes for alcohol and as the clothes had been provided by the workhouse, she was therefore taking advantage of the rudimentary social security system, combining benefits fraud with infanticide.

The arrival of gin
Before gin had come on the scene, Englishmen had drunk beer. English women had drunk it too – up
to a point – but beer and the alehouses where it was served had always been seen as basically male domains. Gin, which was new and exotic and metropolitan, didn’t have any of these old associations. There were no rules around gin. There were no social norms about who could drink it, or when you could drink it, or how much of it you could drink. A lot of places served it in pints because, well… that’s what you drank. A country boy newly arrived in the city wasn’t going to drink a thimbleful of something.

This was, quite literally, put to the test in 1741, when a group of Londoners offered a farm labourer a shilling for each pint of gin he could sink. He managed three, and then dropped down dead. It’s amazing he got that far, as gin, in those days, was about twice as strong as it is now and contained some interesting flavourings. Some distillers used to add sulphuric acid, just to give it some bite.

And so the efforts to ban drinking among the lower classes began. And they didn’t work very well. When authorities decided to ban the sale of gin, there were fully fledged riots. The poor didn’t want their drug of choice taken away. They loved ‘Madam Geneva’, as they called the spirit.

In any case, the government decided to tax the living daylights out of it. But people simply didn’t pay the tax, so government tried to pay informants to hand in unlicensed gin-sellers. This attempt turned ugly as a number of mobs formed to attack even suspected informants, and several people were beaten to death. Not that the informants were necessarily that nice; they could, and some did, run the whole thing as a protection racket – “pay me or I’ll claim the reward from the government”. And into this chaos it’s almost unsurprising that a mechanical cat should make an entry.

The Puss-and-Mew machine
The contraption known as the ‘Puss-and-Mew machine’ was simple. The gin-seller found a window in alleyway that was nowhere near the building’s front door. The window was covered boarded over with a wooden cat. The gin-buyer would approach and say to the cat: “Puss, give me two pennyworth of gin,” and then place the coins in the cat’s mouth. These would slide inwards to the gin-seller who would pour the gin down a lead pipe that emerged under the cat’s paw. The crowds loved it and the inventor, Dudley Bradstreet, made three or four pounds a day, which was a lot of money. As nobody witnessed both sides of the transaction, no charges could be brought.

The Gin Craze was a classic example of a drug without social norms. Every society on earth has had its narcotics (and almost every society has chosen alcohol). But those narcotics have come with social rules about when, where, how and why you ‘get blasted’. Every age and every society is different. Today, young adults tend to get drunk on a Friday evening, while in medieval England, the preferred time was Sunday morning. In ancient Egypt, it was the Festival of Hathor and in ancient China, it was during the rites that honoured the family dead.

Nowadays, gin is just another spirit, but in the 18th century, gin had no norms, no rules, no mythology and no associations. It was anyone’s, and that was its danger: a danger that in the popular imagination was easily transmuted into spontaneous female combustion.

A final note on these combustible ladies: they were all reasonably old and reasonably well off. The strange thing about spontaneous human combustion is that in all cases the body is reduced to a small pile of ashes, whilst nearby objects – however burnable – are not even singed. A human body actually burns at around 1,200 degrees Celsius. A burning house rarely gets above about 800 degrees. So, while the stories don’t stand up scientifically, a society that believes such stories is very good for those who stand to inherit the victim’s fortune.