On this particular trip, I didn’t see very many cemeteries but always and of course, those I did see made an impact on me.

Top Top:  A typical rural cemetery near New Orleans. Away from New Orleans, in-ground burials work fine, apparently. Top Bottom:  Take from a book on New Orleans, a typical city cemetery….all above-ground crypts.

Top Bottom:  The final resting place of more than 17,000 Union dead at Vicksburg National Memorial Park. Look closely and you’ll see some upright stones and some flat stones. The flat ones were when the identification of the soldier was unknown. Scanning the whole scene, it was so sad to see how many flat ones there were. 

The park signboard on the right also shares this:  “At hundreds of Civil War battle sites the remains of fallen soldiers lay nearly forgotten, scattered in woods, fields and roadside ditches.”  Now did they gather those up to bury here???

Burials in cemeteries in New Orleans are tightly packed together and above ground. Why? The water table is too high for in-ground burial. The deceased are not put into coffins (in many cases) but are just laid on a shelf in an above-ground mausoleum…… and such crypts have been, in some cases, used by the family for 150 years. 

Trivia: There are 8000 cemeteries in Louisiana.