Guest bloggers Martin Hoondert & Janieke Bruin of Tilburg University in the Netherlands are creating a FUNERAL LAB to help funerary professionals work with mourners to create ‘good’ funerals. Development of the funeral lab Contemporary Dutch funeral rituals are characterized as personalized funerals. During these funerals, next of kin recall memories about the life of…
Category: Funerals
Online Memorialisation: A developer’s view on being remembered forever in a virtual space.
Guest-blogger, James Duckett, explores some of the considerations in designing virtual memorial spaces from a developer’s perspective. The Memmori website opens with six simple words: Changing the way we remember. Forever. Those words are the core of our ambition, to explore the use of technology to reframe how, when and where we remember our loved…
What happens to the homeless when they die?
As the winter chill bites and the number of homeless in Britain has risen for seven consecutive years, Remember Me researcher, Dr Yvonne Inall, asks what becomes of those who die in a state of homelessness. The number of homeless people in Britain has been on the increase for the past seven years. Crisis UK…
Death in the East: an integrated approach to burial evidence for the Iron Age of eastern England
Guest-blogger Michael Legge, PhD student at Cardiff and Exeter Universities is shedding new light on Iron Age burial practices. The British Iron Age is a period with many mysteries. Despite years of research and excavation, much is still unknown about the period, and the people. Death in the Iron Age, is one avenue where the…
Memorialisation practices among the Poles in Hull: emergent findings (part two)
Dr Lisa Dikomitis, Remember Me Co-Investigator, continues her report on the Case Study ‘Countries Old and New’ Dr Anna Piela has now left our ‘Remember Me’ team to take up a full-time position at Leeds Trinity. We wish her well in her new job and are grateful for her enthusiasm during the fieldwork she conducted…
Memorialisation practices among the Poles in Hull: emergent findings (part one)
Remember Me Project Co-Investigator Dr Lisa Dikomitis reports on our case study ‘Countries Old and New: memorialisation among Polish migrants in Hull’. The Polish case study kicked off in May 2016. Dr Anna Piela and Dr Lisa Dikomitis are the researchers on this project. We are carrying out both traditional and virtual ethnographic data collection…
The ‘speared corpse’ burials of Iron Age East Yorkshire.
Remember Me researcher Dr Yvonne Inall, who is working on our Deep Time study explores a rare Iron Age burial ritual, unique to East Yorkshire. In the summer of 2015 I received an incredible invitation, one of those not to be refused. Archaeologists from MAP Archaeology Ltd. working at Pocklington, in rural East Yorkshire found…
University of Hull to conduct first ever study into how trans identities are memorialised after death
The Remember Me project case study “Who Were They? Trans Identities and Memorialisation” gets underway. Press Release: Researchers at the University of Hull are embarking on the first ever work into how trans and gender variant people are memorialised and commemorated after death. The case study, called ‘Who Were They: Trans Identities and Memorialisation’, will…
Memorialising cremated loved ones – the case of Yorkshire
In this latest Remember Me blog, Co-Investigator Dr Nicholas J. Evans, explores the impact the UK’s first municipal crematoria had upon the changing face of memorialisation in Northern Britain. January 1901 did not just herald the demise of Britain’s then longest serving monarch, Queen Victoria, it also signalled the end of the Victorian celebration of…
Memorialising James Taylor, ‘Father of the Ceylon Tea Enterprise’
Angela McCarthy, Professor of Scottish and Irish History at the University of Otago, looks at the memorialisation of James Taylor, ‘father of the Ceylon tea enterprise’, ahead of the 150th anniversary of Ceylon tea in 2017. Scotsman James Taylor is renowned in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) as the ‘father of the Ceylon tea enterprise’ because…
Spontaneous Memorials and Tributes
This year, 2016 has already been marked by a number of high-profile celebrity deaths including David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee, Prince and most recently Muhammad Ali. These losses have resulted in outpourings of public grief and the creation of spontaneous memorials across the Western world. Yet, this kind of response addresses a much deeper…
The Modern Day Funeral: A Celebrant’s View
Guest Blogger Phil Spicksley writes on some considerations in planning the modern day funeral. Over many years when a person died the Funeral Director would attend and say to the family, “I’ll send the Vicar!” This should not be the case nowadays because more and more grieving families require and deserve a choice when it…
Remember Me. The Changing Face of Memorialisation 