Rural people’s literacy skills in the remembrance of the departed: the writing of personal names on sepulchral monuments at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, more and more sepulchral monuments made of a durable material began to be erected in Finnish rural graveyards. The personal names inscribed on the monuments together with the dates of the deceased, epithets indicating their social status and biblical quotations were intended to reflect in written form the lives of the departed and remind those who come after them about the lives of the ancestors. I use a collective biographical method and databases to examine how sepulchral monuments represented the dead persons’ identities and life stories. I concentrate especially on the personal names inscribed on the monuments and analyse how they can be used as a source for ascertaining the nomenclature of the time and changes in ways that personal names were written. I consider in particular the role of improved literacy skills of the common people in this change. They were an important factor behind the creation of visible monuments and preserving the collective memory of the deceased person.

KEYWORDS:

• collective biographies
• epitaphs
• literacy
• personal names
• remembrance
• sepulchral monuments

Notes

1. This article is part of my postdoctoral research’s project (funded by the Academy of Finland), ongoing during the years 2011–2014: ‘The Benefits of Literacy in Everyday Life: The impacts of improved literacy on the opportunities for social advancement in remote local communities (c. 1800−1930)’.