few new faces i'm janice quick this is a program that i put together actually for at the minnesota state but in society i know that most  probably didn't even know that there was such a thing and for a long time i didn't either i saw some discipline pretty buttons in an antique store one day and bought a few and then couldn't talk myself out of not going back to buy a few more and you know you know how collections start but they happen but i didn't tell anyone i was collecting them because i thought i don't even know why i'm doing this and then i heard about the state button  here's a group of people just like me they probably don't know why they're doing it either but we'll all do it together so this program was originally done for them but i think you'll see some interesting things about summer terry's and buttons it's an unusual combination but i think you'll see a connection on this first screen this is not photo shopped no it's not this this is a or this is a real photo there is there is a cemetery called button cemetery it's not very far from wisconsin dells and it turns out that actually there are four segments hereis in the united states called button cemetery families whose last name is button and none of them are related to each other going to talk to you tonight about about headstones and about some but i want to start by telling you a little bit about some of the some of the superstitions that were running rampant during the during the victorian area era in the united states and i'm talking about roughly seven thousand nine hundred to eight hundred ten sort of sort of in that area so i'm going to just tell you what some of some of these superstitions were because they were pretty bizarre for example if you smell roses when none are around someone is going to die if a firefly gets in your house someone will soon die if you see an all in the daytime there will be a death opening an umbrella in the host means they'll be a murderer in the house now you watch that next time when someone is sick a dog holing at night is a bad omen but the bad effects can be reversed by reaching under the bed and turning the shoes in the other direction it's bad luck to meet a funeral procession head on so if you see when approaching do absolutely everything you can to avoid that funeral procession but if you absolutely can't avoid it hold on to a button and you'll be fine to be no bad effects from that and my all time favorite superstition if a sparrow lands on a piano someone in the home will die i have to tell you if it is in my house if a sparrow landed on a piano i would just die i don't know how that could happen  a visitation and a funeral during during that period of time at around one thousand nine hundred was usually held in the home of the person who had died and in that home all of the curtains were drawn and all of the clocks were stopped at the time of death mirrors were draped with black veils because of a person looked into a mirror at the home of someone who had died and they saw their own image they would certainly be the next to die everybody knows  mourning in the in the united states pretty much followed the example of queen victoria she taught the world hold of mourn when her husband died in in  eighty nine i think it was when edward died she stated mourning for forty years and she essentially dictated how people throughout europe and the united states would dress and act during morning and it was basically whatever i do you do that to this is queen victoria about five years before her husband died and you can see she's wearing light colored clothing and and there is some embellishments to wear clothing  will go to another screen and i'll show you a photo of her fifteen years after husband obviously mourning does not help a person's countenance you can see here that she's wearing all very heavy dark clothing with very few embellish humans and she's wearing what was called a widow scalp and she wore that have until the day she died  as i said she was she was the one who pretty much set the pace for how women would mourn well during during the us in the civil war i had i had read when i was in junior high or high school or something i had read something that that said the smell of death was in the air and honestly i i assumed that that meant corpses you know that meant people dying in the field but as it turns out what it really referred to was the smell of women having to die all of their clothes black when someone in the in the family had died especially if a husband or a brother had had died during the war and and that dying process it was it was really tedious in fact i'm going to read to you the directions that were given to a girl  hundred eighty seven this is how her mother wrote to her and described how she what she needed to do to die her clothes black to indicate that she was in mourning garments to be dyed black must first be cl wash in suds then rinse and hang to dry for woollen goods take six ounces of blue vitriol boil for a few minutes then dip the items for three fourths of an hour airing them often next make a day with three pounds of log of wood and boil garments in this for a half hour start dipping item is again for three fourths of an hour ere goods than dip for three fourths of an hour mor finely washed all died garments and strong suds rinse and line dry there's a good reason why some of the old advertisements for for country stores advertised morning clothes this was just too much work  had any money at all you would go by morning clothes because you also had to remove all of the buttons from your clothing and replace them with black buttons for the first year of mourning the second year of mourning you could replace them with with metal buttons but only if they had simples of death on the buttons so some of those buttons we were going to see are from that second period ok let's go to the next one give you a minute just to love that one that's one of my favorites from the seventeen nineties through through about one nine hundred ten stone cutters and in minnesota and really throughout the midwest carved a lot of tombstones in the shape of tree trunks and they carved them from limestone because limestone was plentiful all along the banks of the mississippi and it was relatively easy to carve so all of these were carved by hand and there was significant symbolism into to the items that were carved into the stones first of all a tree trunk represented a life cut short and each broken branch shown on a on a tombstone represented any media member of the family who had died before but that one's gets a little bit tricky because sometimes that means brothers and sisters or sometimes it means children so if you are using that as a basis for genealogy you have to look at it in both directions to figure out which way that that one worked then the symbols that were added to tree trunks had a great deal of significance for people during that during that time this is the the tree stand for friendship love truth and there in what was called a link to chain it was the symbol of an organization called the odd fellows independent order and there was a very active chapter of that organization with it with a meeting place on pain avenue so it was not very far away and alexander was a very active member of that organization so his wife wanted wanted to honor his community spirit and in his civic responsibility and across to mallett is the local for another and civic organization called modern wo locals because that was where he spent a good part of his time but there was another reason as well because both organizations were very similar to her in brotherhood they provided social activities and especially activities that would help german families assimilate into the culture but they also sold life insurance so if you were if a person had been a member in good standing of the organization at the time that they died the organization would provide one hundred dollars toward the cost of a stone so in this case if you delay and collected one hundred dollars from each of the two organizations and two hundred is is of special interest to me i sort of took her to her at a long time ago she became a favorite of mine there's not a whole lot kno toledo was was born in eight hundred fifty two and french speaking quebec and ad age sixteen i know that she worked in a woollen mill in massachusetts and she lived with her parents some time later she married in minnesota now the funny part about this or the unusual part i should say is her maiden name was robert she and her married name was roper she not a very common name even in quebec so it's possible that she married a relative well when her husband died he left her a forty four year old widow with at least seven children still at home but they were they were they were not young children they were all of an age where they should be working one was a daughter and i assume she married and i lost her you know in genealogy sometimes that happens you just don't know where i don't know who she buried i don't know where she went i know that all of the boys never moved away from that small house that they all lived in together in st paul and none in this case actually i'm pretty sure that i'm pronouncing it correctly because an it because in a couple of places i found it spelled phonetically because whoever was writing the document didn't know how it was really spelled so i'm pretty sure that robe or she was the way this family pronounced it but you would hope so but one interesting thing about this stone is that at the base of it there is a potted callaloo let's go to the next image next stone here death but the the use of a kalar lily i found sort of interesting because it's not native to the united states it's native to south africa and was only brought to the united states for the first time during the eight hundred eighty s but it became so enormously popular that it was used to that image was used to decorate absolutely everything including fabrics and and jewelry and anything that you can think of but it's almost always pictured being in a pot because it wouldn't grow in the ground in minnesota it's not native to to the to the u s this is the tree stone  her older brother nelse is buried in the same location he was an apprentice printer in st paul and then for short periods of time he worked as a printer at the man cato free press and the sleepy i dispatch  and then he was foreman of the folks plot newsletter in new oem he died of tuberculosis at age twenty five so addie and nelse are buried here but i have no idea where his parents are they're not they're not in hick i showed some buttons i have that have the same i configurations on them remember what i said during the first year of mourning everything had to be black during the second of a year of mourning when the when the morning was later then you could replace your clothing buttons with with buttons that had simple such as these as long as they had symbols that represented death then they no longer had to be black i think that's one reason why why there are quite a quite a number of buttons remaining that have those symbols on him because people homely wore them for one year and they probably put them away in a jewelry box this is the gravestone of david newhart j avenue to third street in st paul that was the entire distance and i don't know how this works i apologize i'm not very mechanically minded i know that that it was operated by a moving cable under the road oh and actually when we did this when we did this a cemetery where we have the actor who pro trade someone it at this song i went after you come up here and give your piece what happened was  the management of the company knew that there was something wrong or potentially wrong with the brakes on the cable car but they decided it wasn't worth stopping work for so newhart was assigned to work that day he was on that road now if you can picture the the drop in elevation from the top of s third street as you know it's pretty steep hill while the brakes failed and so what newhart did in an attempt to try to stop the cable line was he and the the break was despite was a bar you know that was manually operated and he threw him his whole self who threw his whole weight onto that lever to try to try to stop the cable car in the process he suffered a long hemorrhage that he would suffer from a severely and he was he was unable to work he had a wife and children to support so he sued the company for damages and i went to court was a big case and the owner of the company came into court and well the court awarded him twenty twenty five thousand dollars which is roughly the equivalent of half a million dollars in today's society but they didn't pay it and they didn't pay  and newhart had a second hemorrhage and died before anything had been paid so his wife his very young wife had to sue the company for a second time to get anything from them at  all and there's no record actually of her being successful she filed but she filed a plea but there's no record that she ever received anything at the table in the back where the button display as i had left a photo of one of the cable cars such you can take a look at that and then see what that looked like ok now let's go to around let's go to a tree stump represents a life cut short and that this when has the image of morning glories can you pick those out because morning glories bloom briefly in the morning and then rapidly fade in the afternoon they became a victorian symbol a love of the brevity of life this is the gravestone of joseph sr and his son joseph jr both  now the funny part about this another funny part of this is though that even though all of the records show that he died at age twenty six the stone but i think that it's one of the stones that was used as rip rap failing like when they were to develop the park but like i said a camp roof that one yet i haven't i haven't gone in yet to find that stone this is another  claims but the primary image on the stone is an anchor and that bothered me for a while because i thought well minnesota is not exactly a seaport i don't believe that this person was was probably closely affiliated with with the sea so i had to do some research and it turns out that  that an anchor is actually representative of refers back to pope clement the first goes back in the year ninety seven just ninety seven nothing in front of th he was persecuted for his faith he was tied to an anchor and thrown in the black sea which doesn't seem very hopeful to me at all but seems like a rather hopeless situation but it turns out that that became the anchor became a symbol of being a incurred in the faith and therefore and therefore a hopeful symbol and you'll see that i included some buttons that have images of both ivy and anchors some of them are made of black class so they could could be worn during that first year of morning some of them are made on the could only have been worn during the second year of mourning the image of wheat tombstone represents l life and rightness for the divine harvest corn corn is is a symbol that represents really the same thoughts and feelings and so you'll see that there's i have buttons with wheat in it and at the top there's one with with a piece of corn an ear of corn this is the the tree stone for eugene shaver next it's interesting that at the ok let's go to another i love this one too now one thing that you might not notice immediately is the image of a hat see that discarded hat gravestone symbolism a discarded hat or shoe or ambrose represents the laying down of life possessions you're just not going to need them anymore but in this this is the stone for seth and in this case i really think it would have been more appropriate if they had if they had portrayed it discarded shoe and his stone because he was foreman at a company name schaeffer and ross was an unexpected boom in the boot business and bicycles were the reason bicycles became became popular and bicycle clubs became popular and inexpensive  was for a couple to ride their bicycle usually with a bicycle club to ride their bicycles from downtown st paul to any of the any of the parks where they would have a picnic and maybe swim or play some tennis and you know and just didn't enjoy a leisurely afternoon and one of those new parks that they were biking to by the way was failon park well ordinarily a woman w ankle length boots because her skirts were a lawn and their scripts were long enough to cover her ankles and her legs but writing a bike you had to hitch up your skirt a little bit to get on that bike and heavens if you ever exposed your leg any part of your leg so all of a sudden all the young women needed need to have knee high boots so they all had to have a second pair of boots so i think i think there should have been  that's the stone of john best mascara draped fabric on a stone is always a symbol of of grief because it's reflective of having to but to pull the drapes and put drapes over the and indicate a life that that unfolds like a scroll of uncertain length and the past and the future are hidden from from view john was a tailor and that's all another reason probably why the where the draped fabric is appropriate for him he died in his tailor shop and saint paul he died amid bolts and bolts and bolts of red white and blue fabric because his specialty was prayed costumes and he made the costumes for many of the local schools and a lot of the organizations and this was during a period of time when every community organization marched in every parade and they all had had their own uniforms well he was making the uniforms for for the annual memorial day parade and and one entire grade school was going to be was going to march as a living flag through downtown st john's so they needed it so that all of them needed to be dressed in either red white or blue and he died while he was working on those costumes both of us worked part time at forest lawn do you know the story about this one well you can you can see that it's in the shape of a chair and it's quite small it's much smaller than the previous chair but this doesn't necessarily indicate that it was a stone for a child in fact this person was fifty five when he died and there is an image of a pillow which is also the same symbolism of the laying down of life's possessions well when i first started doing some research at the cemetery before i was brazen enough for a welcome enough to question very much i overheard one of the cemetery workers saying well i hope tried or doesn't go walk for a walk again and i thought what a strange thing to say i thought who strider and why would we care if they go for a walk well it turns out so the cemetery at their own expense put a cement look at it and put a cement block under it to keep trying to from going from a walk again you never know what you're going to overhear especially at a cemetery ok i'm going to show just one more tombstone it's the one that i usually end tours out when i'm giving tours at the cemetery and you'll see why in just a moment this is the tombstone of hilda walton who died at age two and she it's just like any other collection of prague it gets bigger than you ever expected to the only thing i keep telling myself my son is away at college now so my button collection is in his bedroom so when he comes home the holidays i have to keep saying well you know it could be worse i could be collecting tractor tires you know you know at least buttons are clean and don't take up too much room i'm pretty new  collecting i'm pretty new i would say that i maybe have two thousand i don't i'm just guessing well my friend becky probably has twenty thousand or more i'm just guessing and like any other collection you tend to collect one certain type for a while and then of you can tell by the shank in the back how it was attached to the fabric and we actually have some examples of those we have a sort of poke box back there that take a look at different different types of buttons and one of the reasons that becky is with me one reason is because she's good company a dinner the other really the other reason is is because she has been a president of the minnesota state button society and has served as an advisor on the national but society and if you have questions about buttons she's the one you want to ask she's the best of got a question are it's very much like an anchor it's supposed to be like being tied to your faith but they but some of them messed up especially when the rope was attached to an anchor i've had people who who were true sailors who said well once you start twisting that rope around the anchor then it's called a fall anchor and it has a totally different meaning but the but apparently stone cutters did know that abundance of them than than any other cemetery of bentiu and because i've been doing a lot of cemetery research for a lot of reasons that's saying lot i've been to every separate area and as looked at every stone in every cemetery and seven granite marble are just too hard for hand carving anything that delicate now as time progressed and stone cutters had more or more specialized tools then there would be a little emblem looked like a shield that's that looks very very military yes of a forest lawn cemetery was was opened by a man named anthony emperor seanie he was a stone cutter he was a very good stone cutter and fact some of the stones that he cut for people that are that are in oakland were so good that he was allowed to sign his work there they're really excellent and i've been spending a lot of time trying to find ways when to identify his work from other people's work anyway he purchased some rolling farm land that really wasn't good for farming because it was just too hilaly and that was where he opened forest lawn cemetery he opened it primarily i believe so he could sell more for stones because because he had been one of the first stone cutters in in the twin cities area but then as the number of them grew and grew he needed you know the base for customers all different photos and diagrams of every shape of of ivy leaf that in different stone some guys i'm trying to track which ones are is not only american it's primarily midwestern you'll see a few souls of chicago but very few that's a that's really about free to visit with becky in the back and talk about buttons and i'll be here that but it was you know buttons were something that women who were you know didn't have a whole lot of money and it was something they had you know just in their the little sewing boxes if there'd been a tradition of cutting buttons off of clothing so they already had these things and so they started meeting it's still going today there's something compelling about old buttons and a presentation like janice is giving today really you know opens up and just whole new little wrinkle you didn't even realize that all these late nineteenth century buttons were actually saying something the victorian buttons there was a lot of nature and a lot of you know old we see here in her presentation anymore but the minnesota button society is a group of people and it's dedicated to collecting and educating and learning trading buttons we meet monthly textile center of minnesota we've actually had kind of a resurgence of interest there's just something about you know a button is so common it's ubiquitous everybody has them but then when you look more realize that these are really different these are these are history these tell a story that you have to dig a little bit to find out but it's well worth the pursuit it's so much fun and half of it is the social you know the fun of the fun of the other people who are drawn to the same thing that you enjoy a lot of times you find alone a real treasure reinforces the friendships because you know you'll you'll have somebody that knows exactly what you're looking for and then maybe you'll be at a button convention and they'll size love to you and say look good i have