Looney Tombs: Confessions of a Small Town Funeral Director's Son

Barbara B. Aitken is a public services librarian in the Douglas Library
at Queen’s University, a board certified genealogical record specialist, and a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists.

Looney Tombs is a collection of anecdotal stories about the life of a
funeral director’s son in the Barrys Bay area of the Madawaska Valley
of eastern Ontario. The people who settled there in the late 19th
century were predominantly Polish or Irish, and most of them were Roman
Catholic. The legends and beliefs of these folks had to be respected by
the funeral director and his family. The names in this book have been
changed to protect the privacy of the bereaved families.

The author provides many vignettes about family life in the house where
the funeral director ran his business. The family, with its rambunctious
sons, lived “on top of the parlour,” above the rooms where the
bodies of the deceased would lie in state for several days and where the
wakes and the funeral services would be held. The efforts of the family
members to sustain this business throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, and
to provide an atmosphere of dignity and comfort for the grieving
families, is tenderly described. (Writes Goulet: “It’s our
family’s business. You simply do it because it has to be done. As
undertakers, you must consider the living as well as the dead.”)
Whether the death was due to misadventure, accident, murder, or suicide,
the mortician and his helpers had to deal respectfully with the body and
the grieving family members left behind.

This interesting account of life and death in a small town in Ontario
is recommended for Canadiana collections in public libraries.