Brief look at death in New Hampshire around the early 1900s

I I found an interesting article by Lynn Rainville from the University of Michigan. She mainly discusses late eighteenth and nineteenth century mortuary practices in Hanover New Hampshire but she does touch on some early 20th century aspects in the early 1900s.

She had divided her work into four different time periods that ranged from 1770-1809, 1810-1859, 1860-1889, and 1890-1920. The discussions about the date range of 1890-1920 was what I mainly focused on reading.  Living in Saint Louis my whole life, it was interesting to learn about a different area of the early 1900s.

Rainville provides this table within her article about information collected for individuals buried within 1770-1920. Although this goes back outside of the scope of the time frame I am focusing on, it is still interesting to see.
 

It is interesting that word choices have also evolved over time

In the early part of the 20th century, we begin to distance death from our day to day lives by utilizing hospitals for those sick and dying, the use of cremation becoming an alternative choice to the traditional funeral, and how the death of someone became more of a professional service industry. 

We saw a change of people dying at home to dying in hospitals then being turned over to the funeral director for embalming and to get the body ready for the funeral/wake. This did not only happen in New Hampshire, but all over the country. 

Rainville, L. (1999). Hanover deathscapes: Mortuary variability in New Hampshire, 1770-1920. Ethnohistory, 46(3), 541.