Episode 16: One-Stop Funeral Shops: Undertaking a New Profession

Undertaking was a new profession in the 1860s and 1870s--and an entrepreneurial type of family business. Undertakers had to deploy the skills of embalming, coffin making, and stabling horses. They had to balance the books of a small business, while not appearing to take advantage of folks in mourning. They had to have the ability to calm and console. The pioneering Irish undertakers of the 1860s and 1870s were trusted and known to neighbors and friends--Thomas McLane and Mark McGorray on the West Side, Thomas Gallagher downtown, Michael McGreal in Newburgh, and James Flynn moving east along St. Clair, later Superior, then Euclid.