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 ash...

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 thousan...

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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 possi...

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 Mieus...

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 pl...

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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 weig...

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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...

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 i...

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 centuri...

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 stu...

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 h...

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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...

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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 unwrap...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery, we're diving into a tale of wartime romance, enduring love, and a connection forged across continents. Dalhousie University, 1914. She was a music student, he was an athlete. They were just friends... until the Great War changed every...

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Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Tune in this week to The Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast as Jennie and Dianne dive into the turbulent history of Kansas from 1854-1856, sparked by the New England Emigrant Aid Company's efforts to make Kansas a free state. What they uncover are eerie echoes of today's headline...

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 Dianne and Jennie sit down with Ryan Seidemann for our first Death and Dying 101 episode of 2026. We discuss the Victorian morals of using ground up mummies for miracle cures, the burial practices of Neanderthals, the law regarding modern...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. New year, new memories! Tune in to this week's Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast as Jennie and Dianne share heartwarming family stories from listeners who played our game "Family Tales" with us online as we closed out 2025 and ushered in 2026. It's not too late to play...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. What happens when medical progress clashes with public outrage? Body snatching, bloodletting, and a riot that shook America's founding fathers: join Jennie and Dianne on this latest episode of The Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery as they chat with writer Andy McPhee about his latest book &q...