The above photo is from the gravestone of Frank Augustus Coburn (1861-1908) and can be found in Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon, Georgia . It is of an open book with a cross through a crown inside a circle. Below the circle is ECCLES. XII 1-7. If you look closely, you might be able to make out a series of letters going around the circle. Starting at the top, they are H T W S S T K S. Quite a lot of symbolism going on here. For that, I always turn to the works of Douglas Keister. Using two of his books, Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography and Forever Dixie: A Field Guide to Southern Cemeteries & Their Residents , we can decipher what some of it might mean. I use the word might because we can rarely be sure of what was going on in the mind of the individual who made the decisions as to what was to be put on any particular stone. We must always remember that. The open book, says Keister: "In its purest form an open book can be compared...
Telling the Tales of Tombstones