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Louvain Rees ⚰️

@hellohistoria.bsky.social

12K followers 1.5K following 1.2K posts

BBC award-winning Social Historian ✍️ Death, Wales & Psychiatry 💀 Glamorgan County Lunatic Asylum 🧠 Workhouses | Poor Law | Lunacy 🧠 🥇BBC History Extra '30 under 30' 📚 📍Cardiff | views are my own • she/her 🔗 www.linktr.ee/louvainrees

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · Jan 20

PSA 📢

A lot of my research is centred around death, psychiatry, and mental health history.

Please be aware that some of my posts may be upsetting or uncomfortable to read.

Please keep this in mind when reading my posts

✨️

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Rosie Rowley @thehistoryspy.bsky.social · 3d

#31DaysOfGraves Day 11: Military - hard to choose as most of my photos are of military gravestones and war memorials! Decided this is one of the most poignant headstones in #Macclesfield Cemetery. A family of seven children and their parents; poor Mary Ann lost her husband and all her children...

Black headstone with the Cheshire Regiment crest in gold at the top and gold lettering, naming nine members of the McKay family. The father Robert died in Macclesfield of illness contracted while serving in Africa in 1901. All five sons died while serving with the Cheshire Regiment, one in the Boer war, three in WWI and one in WW2. Two daughters died of influenza at the end of WWI.

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bleary @bleary.off-the-records.com · 18h

If anyone needs me I will be in the museum, lying down next to the bog bodies.

Did people really memorize phone numbers before cell phones, or is that just a movie thing?
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I was watching some old shows from the 90s and noticed people would just dial numbers from memory - like they'd call their friends or family without looking anything up.
Made me wonder if that was actually normal back then? Did people genuinely have all their important numbers memorized, or did most folks keep a little address book or written list nearby?

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 18h

#31daysofgraves • Skeleton 💀

The monument to Margaret Cleyton and her two husbands 💀

📍St Mary's Church • Chepstow ⛪

#Wales #History

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 18h

#31daysofgraves • Skeleton 💀

The monument to Margaret Cleyton and her two husbands 💀

📍St Mary's Church • Chepstow ⛪

#Wales #History

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Chris Woodyard @chriswoodyard.bsky.social · 22h

#31daysofgraves #13 Skeleton
The monument for Elizabeth Benson, obit 1710, in St Leonard, Shoreditch. Carved by Francis Bird, it shows two gleeful skeletons holding a shroud, vigorously ripping apart the tree of life.
www.speel.me.uk/chlondon/stl...

Carving of two skeletons holding a shroud and tearing a tree in half

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 21h

Post you from a different era.

"With her impeccable history knowledge, most people expect Louvain to be an ageing man."

😭😭😭😭😭

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Nancy Johnston @jeelyeater1.bsky.social · 1d

#31DaysOfGraves Day 13: Skeleton. In Port of Menteith kirkyard, Stirlingshire.

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Steve @portaspeciosa.bsky.social · 2d

A C13 stoup by the South door at East Wellow, Hants. Paintwork thought to be of the same period. Bowl modern.

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Pacoulmag @pacoulmag.bsky.social · 1d

#31daysofgraves #MementoMoriMonday
Day 13: Skeleton
Skeleton, no name, warm and cozy for winter in his coffin, and capped with his winged hourglass,
Elie Churchyard, Elie and Earlsferry, #Fife

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🥀🪦 @graveyardgirly.bsky.social · 1d

Day 10: Urn

Love the Virginia Creeper on this one, such a stunning red foliage.

Kensal Green Cemetery, London

#31daysofgraves

A weathered stone grave monument at Kensal Green Cemetery featuring a large urn draped with a stone cloth, symbolising the veil between life and death. The urn itself, a common motif in Victorian funerary art, represents the soul’s immortality and the body’s return to ashes. The draped fabric adds a layer of mourning, suggesting the shrouding of earthly life and the passage into the afterlife. Deep red ivy cascades dramatically down the front and sides of the monument, its colour evoking both love and decay. The grave stands amid overgrown grass, with autumnal trees in the background, creating a poignant, atmospheric scene of quiet remembrance and natural reclamation.

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 4d

#31daysofgraves • Hand 🖐🏻

Er serchog gof am Martha 🪦

📍Edwardsville Cemetery 🪦

#Wales #History

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 1d

#31daysofgraves • Military 🪦

Drummer Trevor Mower (d.1920) 🪦

📍Cathays Cemetery 🪦

#Wales #History

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 1d

#31daysofgraves • Notable Woman 🪦

Catherine Price (d.1749) 🪦

Catherine was the mother of Rev Dr Richard Price.

Following the death of her husband, she resided in Oldcastle with her two daughters.

📍St Mary's Church • Nolton ⛪️

#Wales #History

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 1d

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 1d

#31daysofgraves • Military 🪦

Drummer Trevor Mower (d.1920) 🪦

📍Cathays Cemetery 🪦

#Wales #History

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Friends of Warriston Cemetery @fowarristoncem.bsky.social · 4d

#31DaysOfGraves Day 10 - Urn: We have so many great examples at Warriston that I'm going to do a double post. Sadly, due to historic vandalism, many have been toppled to the ground. #Edinburgh #taphophile #WarristonCemetery 2/2

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Scotland's Churches Trust @scotchurchestrust.bsky.social · 2d

Day 11 of #31DaysOfGraves - Military

Many churches in Scotland house markers that once marked the graves of fallen soldiers of World War One until they were replaced by the permanent headstones erected by the (now) CWGC.

This one in Clackmannan Parish Church once marked Cpt Robert Bruce's grave.

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Scotland's Churches Trust @scotchurchestrust.bsky.social · 1d

Sadly her remains were disturbed in the years before by macabre souvenir hunters, one of whom stole the poor woman's skull, which remained in St Andrew's Uni for many years.

A photo was taken that allowed forensic artists at Dundee Uni to reconstruct her face in 2017.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scot...

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Scotland's Churches Trust @scotchurchestrust.bsky.social · 1d

Day 12 of #31DaysOfGraves - Notable Woman

An unassuming slab of stone off the Fife coast at Torryburn covers the mortal remains of Lilias Adie, the only known grave of an accused witch in Scotland

Buried beneath the tidal line by superstitious villagers in 1704, her grave was rediscovered in 2014

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Sarah Elizabeth Cox @oispooky.bsky.social · 2d

The first British Professional Boxing Association was formed in London in 1885 at the Blue Anchor, Shoreditch. Its founding members numbered around 60. I believe Hezekiah Moscow to be the first Black man to be elected, but the digitised Sporting Life in which they're all named is too faded to read!

Two photos of a nine and a half stone Black or Black mixed heritage Chinese man in his late 20s. On the left he is posing shirtless in white tights, fists raised against a painted backdrop of tropical plants in a studio portrait. On the right in the same studio he is wearing a typical late-Victorian working man's outfit, a dark velvet looking jacket, waistcoat, shirt, trousers.

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Fiona McLees @mclees-fiona.bsky.social · 2d

My favourite suburban sentinel gains gravitas in the dark. Love the strangeness that nighttime brings to quiet suburban scenes

A brick pillar topped with a concrete sphere, at the bottom of a driveway. The pillar is being enveloped slowly by a hedge. The street is dark with a few glowing street lights.

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 3d

🥰

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 3d

#31daysofgraves • Urn 🏺

📍St Mary's Church • Prestbury ⛪

#History

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 3d

#31daysofgraves • Urn 🏺

📍St Mary's Church • Prestbury ⛪

#History

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Louvain Rees ⚰️ @hellohistoria.bsky.social · 4d

#WorldMentalHealthDay 🧠

Here is my piece for BBC Cymru Fyw exploring the daily lives of those who called the Glamorgan County Lunatic Asylum home 💉🧠

www.bbc.co.uk/cymrufyw/665...

#Wales #History #histmed

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