I recently posted a small post in Facebook about funeral home memorial cards which was my rapid response to a clue on "Jeopardy" the day before about the poem "Crossing The Bar" by Alfred Lord Tennyson which has been used on the back of funeral home memorial cards in Appalachia for many years. That post was very actively and positively received by numerous people in Facebook groups devoted to Appalachia. It had never occurred to me to write a post about these two topics despite the fact that I have been saving/collecting both items for quite a few years. I have probably a couple hundred funeral memorial cards, all from funerals or visitations I have attended over the years. I have also recently acquired a small collection of funeral home fans both from funeral homes where I have attended services and from a few small yard sales I have attended. Both these items, especially the fans, are less often seen than in the past. Funeral memorial cards were present at nearly every funeral I ever attended until about ten or twenty years ago. Funeral home fans became less common when the small rural churches across Appalachia nearly all acquired air conditioning. Nearly all Appalachian funeral homes for many years used the fans as advertising and always left a stack in every church where they held a funeral. Many of the older Old Regular Baptist, United Baptist, Freewill Baptist, Holiness, and Pentecostal churches across the region still have some number of the fans which are frequently still used even if electricity and air conditioning are present. But most funeral homes have stopped using them as a form of advertising. Historically, the fans nearly always had a front side which was some generic religious themed reprodution of a religious painting or photograph in color, sometimes a photo of the funeral home building, but more often a painting of one of the more popular depictions of Jesus Christ, either on the cross, the Last Supper, as the Good Shepherd, or arising from the tomb. The reverse side was almost always plain white with the name, address, and telephone number of the funeral home involved. The fans were usually a thin piece of somewhat stiff paper about 8" x 8" with a flat wooden handle stapled to the fan which was about 1" x 8". It was also possible to see the same fans from the same printers being used by both local businesses and political candidates but they are less common. I do have a few political fans in my collection.
This first fan is from the funeral home with which I grew up as a child, The Hall Funeral Home of Martin, Kentucky, and shows Jesus Christ as The Good Shepherd on the front which is one of the most common scenes to be shown on funeral home fans.
This next fan is from a funeral home, the Thornburg Funeral Home, and a community, Farmland, Indiana, in which I have never been. I located the fan at a small yard sale in Stanton, Kentucky, where I also bought several other funeral home fans and a couple of antique books and a corn sheller. It shows a typical Last Supper scene with a typical advertisement for the funeral home on the back.
The funeral memorial card below is from the funeral of a neighbor, Flora Cook Isaac, and has a photo of the deceased on the front which is a common choice for funeral memorial cards.
The interior of Flora Cook Isaac's memorial card is a typical two-sided print statement of birth and death dates, survivors, clergy, burial site, etc. and the left side of the print is the 23rd Psalm which is also a very common inclusion either on the inside left of the rear of these memorial cards.
This next memorial card is from the funeral of my good friend and former auction ring man, Dewey Rogers. The front is a depiction of the pick and shovel of a coal miner, which he had been in his younger days.
I will be adding several more photos to this blog post over the next few days due to a current problem with converting scans and photographs on the equipment I am using. If you like what you have seen so far, please return in a couple of days and I will added to the contents of the photograph section.
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