Coffin plates

The plates in this archive span the 1770s through the early 1940s, though the great bulk fall between the 1840s and the 1920s — the geographic and temporal heart of the tradition. They come overwhelmingly from Ontario and the US Northeast. Most were photographed and transcribed for Ancestors at Rest by the late Lorine McGinnis Schulze of Olive Tree Genealogy over roughly two decades, with contributions from family-historians who preserved their own family’s plates after interment.

Each record captures what the plate itself records — name, dates of birth and death where inscribed, age at death, and a photograph of the original where one was kept. Many plates carry only a name and an age (coffin plates were a remembrance, not a vital record), and where the inscription is silent we say so. Some plates inscribe multiple family members; those appear as separate entries, one per named person, cross-linked to their siblings on the same plate.

Where Lorine recorded a stylistic dating for an undated plate (“ca 1900”, “after 1910”), it appears beside the name as estimated era. Stylistic dates are transcriber notes, not inscriptions; treat them as the educated opinion of an experienced eye, not as primary evidence.