Episodes

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Dianne and Jennie attempt to uncover the history surrounding a wooded cemetery located inside of Indian springs State Park in Butts County, Georgia. We are hoping this episode will encourage anyone who has more information on this cemetery to let us know. Perhaps your ancestors are buried there? We would love to learn more of the stories laid to rest in such a fascinating ordinary, extraordinary ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Kristen Allen, founder of BloomBridge, joins Jennie and Dianne this week to discuss how a promise to her grandmother led to building a business that helps to connect the living and the dead. BloomBridge believes there is something to be said for remembering your loved ones. Honoring someone after they pass is about respect and loyalty. Flowers in a cemetery represent that life is still there and ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne share the history of Montana's oldest and best preserved ghost town and its cemeteries: Bannack, Montana. They tell of the discovery of gold, the tenacity of the residents and they share some of the obituaries of those who were there when the town was born and when it was no more. Come along to another ordinary, extraordinary cemetery in the wild, wild west!

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Special guest Karen Dustman tells the stories of stonecutter W.E.Lindsey who is credited with carving many elaborate headstones in Nevada, California, Illinois and many other states. She also shares the research she and her colleagues have done to publish the stories of the many ordinary, extraordinary souls buried in the Genoa Cemetery in Genoa, Nevada.

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined by special guest Jeff Levy to learn the mysterious story behind a unique, exotic and mysterious headstone located in Denver, Colorado's Fairmount Cemetery. We learn that not everything carved in stone is as it seems in this ordinary, extraordinary cemetery.

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne honor their Irish heritage by exploring Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Ireland. This ordinary, extraordinary cemetery is the final resting place to more than 1.5 million souls including Irish revolutionaries, poets, musicians, and many more wonderful people. It is also the site of a tower that allows you to see the ocean and the Irish mountains. Ireland is a land of stories, magi...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne visit Denver, Colorado's oldest, continuously operated cemetery, Riverside. They will discuss how Riverside Cemetery replaced Denver's first cemetery, how it lost its water rights, and tell three ordinary, extraordinary stories of some of its permanent residents. While this cemetery is no longer the garden glory it once was, it still contains many wonderful monuments and symboli...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Join Jennie and Dianne as they talk with Lisa Sandmeyer, Superintendent at Historic Topeka Cemetery in Topeka, Kansas. Lisa is a wonderful storyteller as she introduces us to several fascinating women who are permanent residents of the cemetery. Some of these women include: Dr. Harriet Adams, (1867-1938), her sister Zu Adams (1859-1911) who made her career with the Kansas State Historical Society...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Lane Gresham and Brooks Garcia join Jennie to tell the stories of those buried in the Old Clarkesville Cemetery in Clarkesville, Georgia. They will introduce us to "the meanest man in Georgia", one of the first great photographers, a young man who lost his life in a tragic farming accident, and many others. They also talk about their many restoration efforts from repairing and preserving tombston...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie, Dianne and special guest Lara Maerz explore Act 3 of Thornton Wilder's play "Our Town". The entire act takes place in the town cemetery. Find out how the fictional cemetery of Grovers Corner, New Hampshire compares to many small town cemeteries across America and around the world. We talk about the importance of sharing and remembering the ordinary, extraordinary people who make up the co...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Love is in the air! OR buried beneath the soil! Join Jennie and Dianne as they visit Layton Cemetery in the town of Blackpool in Lancashire, England and Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina. Both of these cemeteries hold the remains of star-crossed lovers and their stories are retold in this episode. We are very grateful to Deborah Contessa Hargreaves and Jennifer Aaron for allowing us to ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne talk with special guest Deborah Andres. Deborah has dedicated two decades of her life to the funeral profession with an enduring mission to elevate death care to serve grieving families with empathy and professionalism. She spent 5 years at Ang Chin Moh Group, one of the most established funeral services providers in Singapore. Prior to her stint in Asia, Deborah spent over 14 y...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne travel back in time to experience June 25, 1914 in Salem, Massachusetts. On that day the worst fire Salem has ever known swept through much of the city destroying homes, churches, businesses and even part of its first and oldest cemetery, The Old Burying Point. They also "stop by" the grave site of one of the three victims who died as a direct result of the devas...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne virtually visit the gravesites of the first 10 presidents of the United States of America. They also share a bit of each of their inaugural addresses based on what was happening at the time each of these men took the oath of office. By examining each of these addresses, we learn a little about each of these men and how they helped to shape America from it's infancy as a brand ne...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined by Ryan Seidemann and Christine Halling of the Louisiana Cemetery Task Force to discuss what happens to cemeteries and their permanent residents when natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes strike. They share their experience and expertise on planning strategies once they know a storm is about to hit and how they handle recovery and restoration in the aftermat...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne pay a visit to the Old Burying Ground, also called the First Congregational Church Cemetery, in Kittery Point, Maine where lie the bodies of six sailors who lost their lives in a wintery sea accident in 1876. It is a tale of woe and one of a community joining together to do what they could to see to it that these men were not forgotten after their tragic deaths.

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Join Jennie and Dianne as they read select and rather juicy poems from The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. These poems are written from the perspective of those buried in the cemetery of the fictional town of Spoon River. Meet husbands and wives who drive each other crazy, the madam of a brothel who must pay regularly to support the public school, the tragic story of a young woman who...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Merry Christmas! In this episode Jennie and Dianne make a brief stop at the graveside of Louisa May Alcott and then retell one of her Christmas short stories, Tilly's Christmas. We wish you a very merry Christmas!

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne travel back in time to explore the Arctic and the North Pole with three explorers who are buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. Will they meet up with the jolly man in red on their journey? They also tell the story of how Wreaths Across America began and how you can become a part of something that has become an annual tradition for many American families....

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Dianne and Jennie learn the story of Hanukkah and how it parallels to the American Revolution through the war heroes buried in Chatham Square Jewish Cemetery in New York City, New York. They will share the stories of Gershom Mendes Seixas, Jonas Phillips, Haym Salomon, and several others who felt that their desire to be free to live as their laws and religion dictated were worth fighting for in 1...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. It's December and that means for many people a month long celebration of winter festivities as we approach the end of another year. One of those celebrations is, of course, Christmas! In this episode Jennie and Dianne will begin with a visit to the grave of Hetty Green, often called "The Witch of Wall Street". As they tell her story they also share snippets of Charles Dickens's famous Christmas t...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne discuss the founding of the oldest cemetery in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Evergreen Cemetery as well as Colorado Springs will be celebrating their 150th anniversary in 2021! It is a cemetery that is near and dear to Dianne's heart as she has spent the past 20 years volunteering there to help keep it maintained and preserve its history. They will talk about some of the notable p...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne begin this episode in Oak Grove Cemetery in Saint Marys, Georgia, but to tell the story of the Tomb of Acadians which can be found in this charming cemetery, they must travel back to 1755 and the settlement of Acadie in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada. With a little help from the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the long memory of the French-Acadian descendants, Jennie and Di...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Diane speak with Ryan M. Seidemann, lawyer, archeologist, anthropologist, professor, and cemeterian as he tells the true story of the U.S. Marshalls and Judge Issac Parker (often known as the Hangin' Judge) at Fort Smith, Arkansas from the 1870's through the 1890's. He takes us through Oak Cemetery and explains how they chose to be remembered vs. how the generations of the mid-late 20t...