Why Are New Orleans Burials Above Ground?

The search for burial places of Kokernot kin in New Orleans a few years ago brought me to Dispersed of Judah Cemetery on Canal Street, about three miles from the French Quarter. David Kokernot's brother, Louis, has a tombstone there. Louis's wife, Nancy; their children George Washington and Miriam Virginia; and Nancy's brother Benjamin all share the single tombstone shown in the photo. New Orleans is a wonderful place to explore old cemeteries because the residents seemed to be very extravagant in their tombstones, or rather their crypts, which are almost all above ground.

But look at this photo. Jews believe in "dust to dust" and insist on burying their dead. Look at the Christian cemetery in the background, with its tombs above ground. I've been told the reason is the high water table in New Orleans, which would cause a buried coffin to float to the surface and even be carried away in a flood. Really? I observed no floating bodies in the Jewish cemetery, even shortly after Katrina. In fact, I don't see why a coffin should float if it isn't water tight.

Could it be that people don't like the idea of their bodies immersed in water? Dirt's ok, but water's not? Or could it be that an above-ground vault allows more opportunity for creative extravagance?

Mischevous Editor

"No one will ever love your words as much as you do," said someone I've forgotten. The meaning, of course, is that a person other than the author will make the best critical evaluation of that author's writing. That evaluation is the job of an editor. Well, an excellent editor has made just such an evaluation of my well loved writing. Her eleven page critique suggests substantial deletions in some areas, and reordering and expansion in others. The task looks daunting, but I cannot disagree with her inputs. So I'm doing it.

I hate to see the information in the deletions simply evaporate, so I will post the deleted content to this blog, probably with added content to provide context. The first will be the story of the Van Ostern family, like the Kokernots Jews from Amsterdam who emigrated to New Orleans. David Kokernot's brother, Louis, married the oldest Van Ostern daughter, Nancy, and both families initially prospered in the dry goods business. Find the details here.

Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler

As I started some heavy editing to chapter three of my biography of David Kokernot--a chapter I wrote almost four years ago--I grew wistful remembering the three months I spent researching in New Orleans. Chapter three (further described here) relates the happy years the Kokernot family spent in that city in the 1820s. I added these introductory paragraphs to the chapter:

When I arrived in New Orleans, the cab driver dropped me off after dark, and Karissa, my new landlady and self-described “Quarter Rat,” let me into my apartment. She knew, of course, she was dealing with a Yankee, but wanted, nevertheless, to help me avoid injury or embarrassment during my three month research visit to her beloved French Quarter. “Avoid these neighborhoods after dark,” she instructed, tracing them with her finger on the wall map. Her second lesson came as she pointed out the streets. “That’s BurGUNdy,” she said, naming the next cross street southeast of our Toulouse Street location. “Here is CON-tie.” She pointed at Conti Street. “Remember Calliope rhymes with ‘envelope’ and Esplanade with ‘cavalcade,’ Yankee.”

Soon after she left, a thunderous downpour drew me to the window overlooking Toulouse Street. Water cascaded from the rooftops and into the gutters, then ran uphill. After my session with Karissa, I knew exactly where I was and where the river was, and this water was not flowing in the correct direction. Later I learned that the peculiar hydraulics of the lower Mississippi creates a natural levee along its banks, with land sloping down and away from the river. New Orleanians incorporate this fact into their speech. For streets perpendicular to the river shore, like Toulouse, “up” is toward the river. “Down,” naturally, is toward Lake Pontchartrain, several feet below the level of the Mississippi at New Orleans. Likewise one needs to abandon concepts of north-south-east-west when following streets that parallel the curves of the river. Instead, use “uptown” and “downtown,” or “upriver” and “downriver” to understand directions from today or two centuries in the past.

L. M. Kokernot the elder

I had another of those creepy moments a couple days ago--the one where I come across a nugget of information that I know no one else knows. I'm sure Einstein felt the same way when he learned that E equals mc squared. The only difference is that in my case no one cares. But that doesn't change the feeling. Anyway, I learned when, where, and how David Kokernot's father died.

Before now, all we knew was what David Kokernot told his grandson Walter, that his father, "L. M." had drowned in Lake Pontchartrain around 1825. Kent Gardien combined that with the knowledge that he was a dry goods retailer and always lived around water (Amsterdam, New Orleans) to speculate that the elder LM drowned while peddling by boat. It turns out he was actually bathing in the lake.

All this comes about from a wonderful new resource I've only just found. GenealogyBank has the largest online collection of historical newspapers I have found and, better yet, the pages have been OCR'd and the full text is searchable. A search for "Kokernot" in Louisiana for the 1820s turned up two items, shown here. The first, in the August 25, 1827, issue of the Louisiana Advertiser announced that LM had drowned while bathing in the lake. The second, two days later, announced that his business was being taken over by his widow.

OCR, the process of converting a photograph of text into a text file that can be edited or searched is notoriously difficult to do accurately. It's more than difficult with old newspapers with poor printing quality further deteriorated by time. That search for "Kokernot" was actually a search for "Kok*t" which will find common misspellings such as Kokenut, Kokernut, Kokernott, and the rest, and also immunize against some OCR errors, such as confusing "r" and "n." Even so, there are doubtless other occurrances of "Kokernot" that OCR failed to recognize. The patient researcher would, of course, scan the pages online by eyeball. That is possible now for many, many, old newspapers that were unavailable online before GenealogyBank.com.