Funeral homes and mortuary science, California 1926

[supercrook]

I've got a character who is a mortician in 1926, in Los Angeles, California. By all accounts in what I've been able to stir up via Google, the whole funeral home/funeral parlor business was still somewhat new, or at least not as set in stone as it would later become in the '50s/'60s in the US, and most of the information I've been able to find on

Comments

[orange_fell]

It really is pretty complex! I recommend the book "Southern California: An Island on the Land" by Carey McWilliams for information about what LA and other communities were like during the period. It's not exactly recent, but it's extremely well-researched and also fun.

The commenter above also recommended Wikipedia, and there's also a great lot of information there, but if you don't know much about the area it can be hard to pick a place to start. What kind of area do you want your character's place of business to be in? Northridge and North Hollywood are both in the San Fernando Valley and did not exist in their present forms or under the same names in 1926; at that time, the Valley was still mostly ranches and orchards. (I'm disregarding Ventura, Simi Valley, and Orange right now because they are not part of the city of Los Angeles). There were, however, small towns and neighborhoods starting up, so if you wanted your mortuary to be in a rapidly-changing but still semi-rural area, you could choose the Valley.

I googled "oldest funeral home in los angeles" and found this page: http://www.oconnormortuary.com/about-us/our-history. Its original location was in downtown LA, and in the 1920s that area was booming (you can find a lot of info on Wikipedia). One interesting thing from that page is it notes all the improvements made when they moved and upgraded the business in 1906--including getting electric lights, typewriters, and replacing the horses that drew the hearses with automobiles! Changes like those would be in the living memory of your characters. Good luck researching!