The Ordinary, Extraordinary Cemetery

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

This week on the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast, inquiring minds want to know if sea burials of the past were just as solemn and religious as those on land, why post-mortem photos taken in the past were considered more respectable than in today's modern society, could cremated ashes added to tattoo ink harm the living perso...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

250 years ago, America was an idea. Today, it’s millions of stories! This week, we go back to a few of them we've covered on the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast, beginning with Kurt Deion, who spent his childhood visiting presidential graves and now cares for the stories of thousands of Americans at Congressional ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

You’re walking through a 170-year-old cemetery and find a tombstone that’s… a desk? Welcome to Wyuka Cemetery in Nebraska City. The city itself was founded in 1855 after the U.S. Army abandoned Fort Kearny just eight years earlier. Thanks to its spot on the Missouri River, it became a boomtown before the turn of t...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

Happy belated Flag Day! On this week’s Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast, Dianne and Jennie are honoring the women behind the American flag. You know Betsy Ross, but do you know Mary Pickersgill and Grace Wisher? Did Betsy Ross really make the first flag? And why does she have three possible burial sites in Philadelphia?...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

In the previous episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast (#281), Dianne and Jennie explored Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts and some of its most visited monuments including one often called, "The Boy in the Boat" which marks the grave of little Louis Mieusset. We shared the common story that Louis died a...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

Looking for things to do in Boston in addition to walking the Freedom Trail? Might we suggest visiting Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood? This 275-acre historic cemetery, founded in 1848 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, is the final resting place of poets e.e. cummings (all lower c...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

This past Monday, men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice were remembered in Memorial Day tributes across the United States, and on this episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast Dianne and Jennie chat with Ryan Seidemann who returns for the latest "Death and Dying 101" segment with questions his college classes h...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

This week, Jennie sits down with author Daniel Grace to discuss his new novel In the Wake of Golgotha. The conversation weaves together ancient betrayal and modern violence through the intertwined lives of Judas and Pontius Pilate, reborn across two thousand years.

Daniel explores how the weight of history follows us. The book opens ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

Thirty years after her death, Erma Bombeck is still the patron saint of moms everywhere so it felt only fitting to celebrate her life and legacy with Mother's Day just around the corner. She wrote the messy, hilarious, heartwarming truth about marriage and motherhood before it was a hashtag. "I brought children into this lousy, mixe...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

Sometimes a chat with your local butcher can lead you down a very curious rabbit hole and that is exactly what happened to this week's returning guest, historian Joy Giguere, on this latest episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast. Some history is easy to miss until you know what you’re looking for. In the 1920s,...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

This week on the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery, Jennie and Dianne are joined by one of their favorite living historians MJ Henion, to unravel a Civil War mystery that still haunts historians today.
Meet Brigadier General Richard B. Garnett, a Confederate officer whose story ends at Pickett’s Charge… or does it? Tho...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

When the 2008 recession upended Eric Anderson’s career, he never imagined the detour would lead to cemetery service. But that’s where he found work that truly mattered. After walking through personal loss herself, his wife Megan joined him, bringing a heart for steady, compassionate guidance in life’s hardest momen...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

On this episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast, Jennie and Dianne are joined by author Gigi Berardi to talk about "Bianca’s Cure", her fact-driven historical novel about Bianca Capello, who in real life was famed for her beauty, but Gigi’s Bianca is a scientist centuries ahead of her time,  hunting a...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

This week, Jennie and Dianne are "digging" into some truly Ordinary Extraordinary recent news stories from cemeteries across the US. First up, Lafayette, Colorado, where a local cemetery has run out of burial space, leaving families in a lurch despite owning plots. Then, on to the stunning shores of Lake Superior in Minnesota, where...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

Just as Women's History Month wraps up, Jennie and Dianne chat with author Sherry Sky Stuart about her fascinating new book, Forgotten Female Felons. Skye resurrects the stories of women locked up in the Colorado Territorial Prison, kicking off with the first female felon from 1872. With help from original prison records and other r...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." — Virginia Woolf    

In this episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery, Dianne and Jennie follow a single name etched on a simple marble stone in the Pioneer section of Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs - Lorenda Judd. She rests there alone. No husband, no c...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

What dessert would you eat in a cemetery? This week, we're sharing some of your wild and wonderful social media responses to that very question, inspired by the authors of "To Die For A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes" and "Haunted Virginia Cemeteries"! We're unwrapping a brand new episode that also features classic clips from our ch...