The Dead Belong to the Living: Disinterment and Custody of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

Historians have long noted the growing distance between the living and the dead over the course of the nineteenth century. As private control over the dead was ceded to medical experts, funeral professionals, and municipal governments, interactions with mortal remains grew increasingly rare, and the formerly intimate relationship between living and dead family members became more remote, if also more sentimental. This transformation, however, was neither instantaneous nor total. Indeed, rates of voluntary reburials undertaken by family members seem to have increased around the turn of the century. These disinterments appear in the legal record after midcentury, when American courts began adjudicating family quarrels over exhumations. Using these cases, which amounted to custody battles over dead relatives, I argue that families did not easily relinquish control over physical remains in this period. Though a preference remained for protecting the repose of the dead, both families and civil courts increasingly came to regard the disinterment of bodies as acceptable, even reverential. Living family members viewed their own emotional wellbeing as inextricably linked to the location and condition of these bodies, over which they retained a vigilant sense of proprietorship, even decades after burial. Despite emerging scientific understandings of death and decay and new institutional controls over the disposition of mortal remains, these cases suggest that a powerful desire to control and possess the dead in bodily form remained a prominent reaction to death throughout the nineteenth century.