Widow’s Weeds and Weeping Veils
By Bernadette Loeffel-Atkins
(December 2008 Civil War News)

Illustrated, endnotes, bibliography, softcover, 40 pp., 2008. Bernadette Loeffel-Atkins, 2636 Emmitsburg Rd., #19, Gettysburg, PA 17325, $7.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Blake A. Magner
Blake A. Magner is the Book Review Editor of Civil War News. He makes his liv­ing as an editor, writer, car­tographer and photographer of Civil War history. He is author of At Peace With Honor: The Civil War Burials of Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Review:
Many students of the Civil War know of the more than 600,000 who perished during the conflict, but this figure does not include the normal everyday deaths caused by disease, a high infant mortality rate and death from childbirth, accident and old age.

What many forget is that for every one of these deaths a grieving family was left behind to mourn.

In Widow’s Weeds and Weeping Veils, author Bernadette Loeffel-Atkins has compiled an excellent primer on the mourning customs of the 19th century.

She covers such topics as wakes and funerals; undertakers; postmortem photography; mourning art, mourning jewelry and clothing; as well as etiquette, songs of sorrow and funeral recipes.

Nineteenth-century Americans were obsessed with death. Whereas sex was a taboo topic of conversation, death was a popular topic, unlike today where those two subjects have switched places.

Grieving became popular in England with the death of Queen Victoria’s husband Albert near the beginning of the American Civil War, and it remained popular until the Queen’s death just after the turn of the century.

This volume is nicely written. The illustrations depict many aspects of period mourning. I highly recommend Ms. Loeffel-Atkins’ volume to the readers of Civil War News. I am sure most people will learn something they did not previously know. I know I did.