One of the most common ways to say "died" in an early New England epitaph is to just come right out and say it: died. No euphemisms, no flowery language, just died. It's not quite as popular as "departed this life," but it is a close second.
Thaddeus Ridden, Marblehead, MA (1690/1)
3 comments:
Two interesting typos (carvos?) on that stone: he got the name "Ridden" wrong somehow and ground it down for a correction, and he also had initially carved "1691" and then ground out the 1 and replaced it with the double 0/1. (Wouldn't it have been fun to be a fly on the wall in the workshop when corrections were being made?)
Is that a Lamson family stone?
I've been looking over the examples in Forbes and I think it might be a stone by William Mumford. It has that pronounced triangle-inside-triangle nose and lots of shared uprights in the lettering. The tympanum design is similar to the Prudence Whitwell stone (opposite pg. 6 in Forbes) and the borders remind me of the Nathanael Mather stone (pg. 18).
I generally think of Lamson stones as having squarer heads and more lower-case letters.
What do you think?
Yes, from Forbes it does look like this is a Mumford stone. I haven't spent enough time examining them in person to be able to recognize them easily, but that seems like the best guess.
The swash J in January is very nice.
Post a Comment