Author: Janet Greene
Publisher: Hood, Alan C. & Company, Inc, 2005
Soft Cover, 8.5″x5.5″, 120 pages

An epitaph is a commemorative inscription on a tomb or mortuary monument about the person buried at that site. It can be in the shape of a brief poem or other writing and is typically in praise of the deceased person. This is the paperback reissue of a book originally titled Over Their Dead Bodies: Yankee Epitaphs & History by Thomas Mann and Janet Greene originally printed in 1962 by Viking Press. Before going out-of-print, it had sold over 40,000 copies.

This collection of gravestone epitaphs is from the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth. It is an unusual perspective of New England history. It provides a full range of religious concepts, personal histories and marriages, eccentricities and moral admonitions, wrenching grief and a surprising amount of humor. You may start with one or two but inevitably become fascinated, drawn to page after page of a striking series of testimonies remembering our forebears in stone.