Postmortem spouse residence in nineteenth-century illinois cemeteries: Patterns of kinship and land tenure

Abstract

Abstract Rural American patterns of inheritance in the nineteenth century often emphasized the maintenance of land by family members defined by ties of “blood” rather than the passage of land to relatives defined by marriage, or affines. This end was accomplished in a number of ways, often to maintain the integrity of holdings in the face of laws demanding equal inheritance among children. It is argued here that substantive physical remains of inheritance behavior can be noted in the postmortem disposition of spouses in some nineteenth-century rural cemeteries in central Illinois. Although burial of a female spouse in her husband's family plot is an accepted theme of American mortuary behavior, two other themes are possible: burial of spouses separately with their own blood families or burial of the male spouse in his wife's blood-family plot. In a sample of nineteenth-century rural family cemeteries from Illinois it is shown that burial of the female spouse with her husband's family, called virilocal bur...