My Dad was born in 1914 AR, he once told me that when he was about 5 or 6 years old he heard a loud blast on the next farm and his Mother told him to go see what it was and he ran down there and found that the neighbor man had been sitting on the front porch and shot himself, blowing the side of his head off. Dad ran and told his Mother and she told Dad to take a broom and keep the cats off the neighbor man while she went out to the field to get Grandpa. I don't know if this man had much of a family, Dad said the woman just wrung her hands and cried. Grandpa came down there and removed the man and the women cleaned him up the best they could while Grandpa cleaned the porch and built a casket to lay him out in. Dad said they had a funeral and the Minister and other people were there but I didn't think to ask if they buried him on the farm or in a cemetery. I never asked him if it was in OK or AR. I know my other Grandpa carved the white headstones for the graves of my brother and sister in the early 1930s in TX and inserted their pictures in the stone. But there were Drs. and undertakers and everything official then. I think people were more self reliant because of necessity in some places I often thought of that poor neighbor man as I have looked for death certificates. I wondered if that death is in the records anywhere? I wonder how many times farm people just "handled" terrible accidental deaths the best they could. I could not imagine the Grandparents I knew having to handle a body like that and said as much to Dad. He looked at me as if I had lost my mind and said "Honey, we were miles from town, these people were our neighbors, his poor old wife was all to pieces, what kind of people would we have been not to help?" Dad was over 70 years old and had finally got attached to a cat and I was dumbfounded to see it after what I had thought was a lifelong fear of cats. I had asked him what had made him have such a fear of cats all his life and he was trying to recall and that memory came up. He had never even mentioned the incident about the neighbor until that day. Now I wonder how many deaths were handled in such a fashion? Charlene

I believe that it was common practice, up until the 1930s and 1940's for especially farm or country families to handle deaths without funeral homes, and undertakers, as we now know them. My husband's family tell the story of an incident that happened when he was a child. Seems they noticed lanterns and candles after dark one evening on the dirt road near their home. On closer inspection, they found that someone had died, and family had brought him to the cemetery that wasn't far from their home, and buried him at night. The reasoning for this, was it was hot summer time, and no air conditioning, or embalming, the body would not have been in good shape by morning. Things have changed greatly, including laws that govern burials, since then. Jettie