The Salt Lake City Cemetery was established in September 1847 when George Wallace, who arrived with the first company of Mormon pioneers two months prior, buried his young daughter on a picturesque hillside above the Salt Lake Valley. It has since grown to become the largest municipal cemetery in the United States, containing approximately 130,000 gravesites. To walk through the Salt Lake City Cemetery's 120 acres is to trace a path through Utah history and experience a mosaic of the diverse and fascinating individuals who have shaped it: politicians, pioneers, artists, inventors, outlaws, educators, activists, and currently 12 presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This book highlights these influential figures and many more. It also serves as a guide for navigating the cemetery grounds in person, with grave locations accompanying most captions.

“Haunted mansions, phantom nuns and a poltergeist wedding crasher . . . The book’s pages are filled with accounts of ghostly sightings.” —Deseret News Uncovering ghost stories in Salt Lake City leads to a spooky mixture of legend, lore and local history. A young female apparition likes to surprise guests of the McCune Mansion by leaping from a mirror. Believed to be stationed at Fort Douglas, a Civil War vet named Clem still teases female visitors. Staff at the historic Devereaux Mansion, once a major social center, relented in their vain nightly attempts to keep the lights off and let the spirits continue their eternal party. And nuns of the Sisters of the Holy Cross still visit patients in the hospital they established. The guides of Story Tours’ Salt Lake City Ghost Tour reveal characters who just can’t seem to leave the valley.

A hauntingly beautiful travel guide to the world's most visited cemeteries, told through spectacular photography andtheir unique histories and residents. More than 3.5 million tourists flock to Paris's Pè Lachaise cemetery each year.They are lured there, and to many cemeteries around the world, by a combination of natural beauty, ornate tombstones and crypts, notable residents, vivid history, and even wildlife. Many also visit Mount Koya cemetery in Japan, where 10,000 lanterns illuminate the forest setting, or graveside in Oaxaca, Mexico to witness Day of the Dead fiestas. Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery has gorgeous night tours of the Southern Gothic tombstones under moss-covered trees that is one of the most popular draws of the city. 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die features these unforgettable cemeteries, along with 196 more, seen in more than 300 photographs. In this bucket list of travel musts, author Loren Rhoads, who hosts the popular Cemetery Travel blog, details the history and features that make each destination unique. Throughout will be profiles of famous people buried there, striking memorials by noted artists, and unusual elements, such as the hand carved wood grave markers in the Merry Cemetery in Romania.

This groundbreaking series recounts the lives of women of faith and dedication in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Often in their own words, they share their trials, triumphs, and testimonies.This fourth volume features women born between 1872 and 1900 whose stories explore a comparatively untapped era in Mormon history. This generation of Latter-day Saint women experienced firsthand the challenges of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and World War II. They also witnessed the unprecedented global expansion of the Church and the first young women to serve as proselytizing missionaries.You will become reacquainted not only with such well-known figures as general Relief Society president Belle S. Spafford and Camilla Eyring Kimball, wife of President Spencer W. Kimball, but will also meet Kasimira Viktoria Cwiklinski Wurscher, who led the Relief Society in communist East Germany for more than twenty years; Edith Papworth Weenig Tanner, a British spy during World War I; and Maria Guadalupe Monroy Mera, who endured deep persecution, including the martyrdom of her brother, for her family's acceptance of the restored gospel in Mexico.The faith these women exhibited as they rejoiced in blessings and dealt with struggles provides a model for us today in facing our own challenges as we too strive to build lives of faith.

The blogger behind Confessions of a Funeral Director—what Time magazine called a "must read"—reflects on mortality and the powerful lessons death holds for every one of us in this compassionate and thoughtful spiritual memoir that combines the humor and insight of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes with the poignancy and brevity of When Breath Becomes Air. We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and—when it can be avoided no longer—letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference—in other people’s lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed: The family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial The act of embalming a little girl that offered a gift back to her grieving family The nursing home that honored a woman’s life by standing in procession as her body was taken away The funeral that united a conflicted community Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde offers an intimate look into the business and a new perspective on living and dying

As pioneers attempted to settle and civilize the ?Wild West,? cemeteries became important cultural centers. Filled with carved wooden headboards, inscribed local stones, and Italian marble statues, cemeteries functioned as symbols of stability and progress toward a European-inspired vision of Manifest Destiny. As repositories of art and history, these pioneer cemeteries tell the story of communities and visual culture emerging together within the developing landscape of the Old West. Annette Stott traces this story through Rocky Mountain towns on the western frontier, from the unkempt ?boot hills? of the early mining camps and cattle settlements to the more refined ?fair mounts.? She shows how people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas contributed to the visual character of the mountain cemeteries, and how the sepulchral garden functioned as an open-air gallery of public sculpture, at once a site for relaxation, learning, and social ritual. Here, widespread participation in a variety of ceremonies brought mountain communities together with a frequency almost unimaginable today. Illustrated with eighty-three striking photographs, this book shows how the pioneer cemetery emerged as a site of public sculpture and cultural transmission in which each carved or molded monument played dual (and sometimes conflicting) public and private roles, recording the community?s history and values while memorializing individuals and events.