Logo image
WHERE THE CHILDREN LIE
Thesis   Open access

WHERE THE CHILDREN LIE

Allison Corinne Hawley
University of West Florida
Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida
2015

Metrics

28 File views/ downloads
38 Record Views

Abstract

Carnley is a small, rural, family cemetery near Chumuckla in Santa Rosa County, Florida (site #8SR844) that was in use from the late 1884 to the early 1936. At Carnley cemetery, fifty percent of the identified graves are juveniles between the ages of 0 and 5 years. A number of explanations are possible for this high percentage of child burials. In this paper, I test the hypothesis that children were buried more frequently in family cemeteries than in community cemeteries, possibly due to social concepts of childhood and child mortality, and that creating a burial ground for children was one of the primary roles of the family cemetery during this time period. In order to test this hypothesis, I compare the mortality structures of Carnley Cemetery to that of a contemporaneous community cemetery, and use Fisher's Exact Test to measure the statistical significance of the differences in ages 0 to 5 mortality rates between the cemeteries. I then create GIS maps of the two cemeteries to analyze the spatial structure of these cemeteries in order to detect patterns in burial location that would indicate age-based mortuary choices.
pdf
uwf:61073DownloadView
Open Access

Details

Logo image