Updating headstones?

[British Viking]

How is this done - espicially with graves where more than one person is buried in the same plot? Does the stonemason come round and merrily chip away or is the headstone taken to wherever they go, updated then returned to the original spot at a later date?

[mikejee]

I was talking to a funeral director a few years ago from whom I had ordered a headstone. He said that these originally are nowadays pepared by a machine which does the cutting. Proper stonemasons are only used for additions. Whether the stone is taken away of done in situ would depend on the size of the monument, and whether it could be easily removed

[notanotherminer]

Last year my Dad decided he wanted to organise and pay for his own funeral. He wants to be buried in my grandfather's grave and discussed his wishes regarding the existing gravestone with the stonemason.

He discovered that a person does not have to be buried in a particular grave to have a memoriam written into the stone so he promptly gave instuctions for the names and dates of death of my grandmother and stepmother (who were both cremated) to be inscribed on the gravestone, allowing space for his name to eventually go on.

In this case the mason took the stone away and did the required in his workshop. It was put back in place after a couple of weeks

However, I should imagine in the case of a large memorial stone this work would be done in the cemetery

[Margaret08]

My mother-in-law is buried in the same grave as my father-in-law, when she died we just told the Funeral Director that we wanted her details added to the stone that was already in place, a month or so after the burial we were contacted and asked about the wording, after the grave had settled we were contacted again and told the the headstone and the rest of the grave had been put back together again along with the new inscription added under the original one. I don't know what happened inbetween, but I assume that the headstone had been sent off somewhere for the inscription to be added.

There are some family graves where details of children who have died elsewhere have been added to the stone - a boon for me as I found out where some strays had died, saved me a lot of looking and wondering!

Margaret

[Ladkyis]

There was not room for any additions to the headstone on my grandparents grave so when my parents and uncle died and were cremated we arranged for a "slope" to be added to the front of the stone. The thing that took the longest time was getting the incumbent vicar to agree. she took nearly 8 months to decide that we could add the extra stone. If there had been room for the additional lettering then the stone would have been removed from its base and taken away to be carved then brought back and reset.

[barbara lee]

My father died in 1998 and my mother in 2001. We had the stone carved with Dad's name after he was buried, then asked for Mum's details to be added three years later. They certainly took the stone off the grave to their workshop, because when they put it back I was charged extra for an "earth anchor" that hadn't been required in 1998. Health and Safety, apparently.

Barbara