Lambs and Mothers: Trends in Grave Monuments and Burial Patterns in 1850-1900 Victoria

Our data set was immigrant infant and childrens’ graves from the British Isles in Ross Bay cemetery from 1850-1900, down near the water closer to Dallas Road. Examining these graves, we posed two research questions: one, are there any distinctive trends in child’s grave markers in the late 1800’s; two, is there an association between multiple burials of children with their mothers or other female family members? Are children who died before their mothers reinterred with mothers who have survived them after the mother’s death, or is it the other way around?

View Ross Bay European Infant and Children Burials in a larger map

                A distinctive trend we found in the children’s graves in our data set was that three of the graves feature a lamb carving on top of the grave stone—one, marked only as “BABY,” has the lamb resting, as if asleep, and the other two (Roswf Ferguson and Lilian Johnson) have lambs who are lying down, but with a raised head. The third grave, Lilian Johnson’s, had a lamb with a broken head, but it appears from what is left of the lamb that the head would be raised. It has been argued before that imagery on gravestones of children is to put the parents of those children at ease—a study done on the gravestones of children between 1840 and 1899 in Delaware found that many of these stones “reflected the survivors’ need to remember the child and have comfort in their loss” (McKillop 95).  Among common depictions were sleeping lambs, depicting death as a peaceful place of rest.

The only grave with a sleeping lamb is that of a child 10-19 days old, probably not baptised as there is no name on the stone, the “BABY” grave, and this infant died in 1885. The other two infants, one a month old and the other one year, both depict lambs which are not sleeping, and died in 1891 and 1893, respectively. This may indicate a shift in the attitudes towards the death of children, or a shift in the attitude towards heaven as a place of rest—as the sleeping lambs in Delaware indicated heaven as a place better than earth, God had selected the child to be brought to heaven, or that “the child was only asleep” (McKillop 95). That in a later period there are lambs that are clearly awake may mark a significant change in ideology, but what or why is unclear.

In our data set there are three legible graves that contain multiple family members, and one that is barely legible. The first contains Hannah and Anastasia Dowes, aged 39 and died in 1877 and aged 4 months and died in 1867 respectively. Next are Kate (aged 39, died 1878), Georgia Kate (aged 7 months, died 1867) and Anne Gertrude Wolfenden (aged one year, died 1870). Elen Carr Donnelly, aged 69 and died 1899, is buried with her granddaughter, Grace S. Mclellan, who was four months old and died in 1900. Except for Donnelly and McLellan, where there seems to be a clear line separating  Donnelly’s grave from McLellan’s, it is unclear whether the infants and later adult burials are in the same grave or there are separate graves marked by one stone.

Of significance is that all three of these graves contain young girls, all infants, buried with an older woman in their family. A study of American values of the mother’s role in the family may help put insight into the importance of keeping young children with an older woman in the family; the mother’s role within the household as a moral guardian, or “to save her family from moral decay,” may indicate the reason for infant girls to be buried with or near older female family members even after the infants have already presumably been buried elsewhere (Rust 8). Reburying infants with their mothers or a mother figure after her death may be a way of compensating for that loss of moral guidance in life. The only infant in this set buried after the older woman is specifically stated to be her granddaughter—and the grandmother had died the year before. It is quite possible that there was no need to remove McLellan from her grave to later be with her mother, as she already had a moral figure near her.

The lamb figures on infants’ gravestones may be about consoling the surviving parents, and reburying children with their recently dead mothers may be a way of bringing the family back to its moral center in the afterlife, reflecting the mother as the moral center of the home. 


Similar Articles:
Meagan Dicks: Memorial Monument Analysis
Baylie Corner: Ross Bay Cemetery, Why are there So Many Dead Babies?
Joelle Ingram: Infants of the 19th Century


List of References:
McKillop, H., 1995. Recognizing Children's Graves in Nineteenth-Century Cemeteries: Excavations in St. Thomas Anglican Churchyard, Belleville, Ontario, Canada, Historical Archaeology 29 (2), pp. 77-99.
Rust, J.L., 1992. Death Artifacts and Rituals as a Reflection of the American Family since 1850 [Online] Available at: http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/student/honorstheses/pdfs/R87_1992RustJohannaL.pdf [Accessed 1- February 2011]