The Family Plot Blog
How to Magically Make a Stained Glass Window
If you had a funeral home with a windowless chapel, how could you change the look without having to spend major dollars on a reconstruction? Church Window Film, one of the new exhibitors at the ICCFA convention, has an ingenious solution. The company has been producing custom made stained glass UV window film that looks like genuine stained glass since 1979. They offer colorful custom designs that can be applied to existing windows, changing...
Video: Sich Casket Company at ICCFA
Sirius Chan is very serious about making high quality American style caskets available to U.S. funeral directors at astonishingly low prices. He's able to do that by making Sich Casket Company's products in Ningbo, China and importing them to the United States. At the ICCFA convention and expo, Chan said, "We build all of our caskets in China, but they're all American styled, and made according to American specs.... We're always seeking to...
Video: Interview with Before I Go Solutions
Jane Duncan Rogers is a death educator based in Scotland. She runs a website called Before I Go Solutions, offering information, preparation and inspiration to address death, dying and grief. She provides workshops, programs, and consultations for people to plan ahead. She also does webcasts on her site. Jane recently did this online interview with Gail Rubin, The Doyenne of Death®, whose business is A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those...
Publishers Weekly Gives Rubin’s Bucket List Book a Positive Review!
Publishers Weekly, the bible of the publishing industry, recently ran a positive review of KICKING THE BUCKET LIST: 100 Downsizing and Organizing Things to Do Before You Die. Here's what they published (with paragraph breaks added to ease the eyes of the reader). Rubin (A Good Goodbye), a certified thanatologist, takes a not-so-grim look at how to reap life’s benefits while preparing for death. Rubin’s common-sense approach is broken down into...
Free Veterans Benefits for Funerals and Burial
Cheryl Ites with the Department of Defense had a booth at the ICCFA expo to help educate funeral directors on the free services to which veterans are entitled. U.S. veterans may not realize the range of funeral and burial benefits they get as thanks for their service. Benefits include: Burial or interment of cremated remains in a national cemetery with one spouse, and depending on individual situations, minor children; A memorial marker in the...
New Developments in Meaningful Funerals and Cremations
Videos of interesting products and services I saw at the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA) convention and expo in Nashville, TN are now online. Funeral directors looking for new ways to make meaningful memorial services (to help those who have lost loved ones) found some fresh approaches, as well as tried and true services. Visit the Family Plot Blog to see posts in the Tools of the Trade section of the blog....
Video: Tour This Top-of-the-Line Hearse
The funeral service vehicles on display at the expo for the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA) are always a treat to tour. The automotive companies show hearses, family cars, removal vehicles, flower cars, and even party vans. In this video, Gail Rubin, CT, talks with Nathan Hurst, National Sales Manager for Eagle Coach Company and Federal Coach Company. They examine elements of Federal's top-of-the-line Echelon...
May 23: New Hampshire Phaneuf Funeral Home Talks
Attention residents of Manchester, New Hampshire: Gail Rubin is coming to your town to speak! Phaneuf Funeral Homes and Crematorium is pleased and proud to host “The Doyenne of Death®,” Gail Rubin, CT, for TWO end-of-life and funeral pre-planning seminars in May. She's presenting "Kicking the Bucket List: Downsizing and Organizing Things to Do Before You Die." These events promise to be a lighthearted and educational way to help you learn about...
May 20: ABQ Death Cafe
The next Albuquerque Death Cafe is scheduled for Saturday, May 20, from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Gail Rubin’s home. The objective of the Death Cafe is “To increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.” It’s an interesting, unstructured conversation – open and free-flowing with no specific agenda and respectful of all points of view. It’s an opportunity to discuss what’s on your mind or in...
Video: Personalization Products from Funeral Home Gifts
Funeral Home Gifts started offering tribute blankets to funeral directors in 2008. Over nine years, they expanded their line of photo-based personalized memorial products to include casket cap panels, portraits, keepsake pillows and photographic urns. In this video, Karl Weisenbeck, Division President of Funeral Home Gifts, discusses these items on display at the 2017 ICCFA convention and expo. The photographic woven blankets are very popular...
Video: Everdays Gathers Supportive Family and Friends
Mom's dog-eared personal phone book in the kitchen drawer is a thing of the past. How will you contact all of the family and friends who need to know about a death in the family? The answer is right there in your smart phone, with help of the Everdays app. Everdays introduced the Everdays Partner Dashboard to funeral directors attending the ICCFA convention and expo. It allows the funeral home to easily create and give elegant digital memorial...
A New Way to Scatter Cremated Remains
When the cremated remains he was scattering ended up dropping in clumps on his shoes, Scotty Crandlemire knew he needed to invent a better way to disperse ashes at a memorial service. After that negative memorial experience, he created an answer to the problem: AngelAire release urns. "As with most inventions, necessity is the mother of invention," said Crandlemire at his booth at the ICCFA expo. "I had a bad experience scattering ashes.... I...
Video: How Answering Services Help Funeral Directors
When a loved one dies at 2:00 a.m. and a family member calls a funeral home, who answers the phone at that hour? While some funeral directors answer the phone themselves 24/7, in many cases, a midnight call will be taken by an answering service. In this interview with Kathy Kelley with ASD, the Answering Service for Directors, she explains the benefits for both families and funeral directors. ASD has been in business since 1972, specializing in...
Video: Discreetly Scatter Ashes with Walking Stick Urn
Wout Brink came from the Netherlands to show his brilliant idea to folks at the ICCFA convention. His TOLAD aluminum walking stick doubles as an urn that discreetly scatters ashes over the course of a one-mile memorial hike. In the video below, he demonstrates how it works. TOLAD stands for Totem Of Life And Death. Every time the staff hits the ground, it releases a circle of cremated remains. You could take the cremated remains of a loved one...
April 29: Downsizing Talk to Delta Kappa Gamma
Delta Kappa Gamma, the International Society for Key Women Educators, is holding its Theta State convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 28 through 30, 2017. On Saturday, April 29 at 3:45 p.m., Gail Rubin will present "Keys to Downsize and Organize Your Life." Here is the description of the 45-minute talk: You don’t have to be old or dying to downsize. When you’ve lived in the same place for a decade or three, stuff accumulates. We get...
Fun News About Funerals – Really
The 2017 Frozen Dead Guy Days festival was another huge success! More than 20,000 people flooded the streets of Nederland, Colorado for this crazy celebration of the dead and the frozen. We had more than a thousand people, a 25% increase over last year's number, who came to see the documentary "Grandpa's in the TUFF Shed" and cheer on the couples who played The Newly-Dead Game®. You can watch videos of all three games through this Family Plot...
How to Make Moving Less Stressful
The New York Times ran an article, "How to Avoid Stress When You're Moving" by Jen A. Miller, which had lots of great tips for planning ahead and being prepared for one of life's most stressful events (almost as stressful as a death in the family). Moving has lots of moving parts, made even more stressful when you have to move out sooner than you originally planned. A helpful checklist sidebar of what to do when provided detailed guidance in a...
Video: Bourbon Tasting and Preneed Funeral Insurance
Offering free bourbon and chocolate tastings is an effective way to get people to visit your trade show booth. The fine folks at Global Atlantic Financial Group hit all the right notes at ICCFA in Nashville. In this video, Maureen Carney, Director of Business Development - Sales for Global Atlantic, shares how they are able to get 6% growth on their preneed insurance policies. A note to those who preplan and prepay - in most states, you buy an...
What You’ll See at the 2017 ICCFA Expo
Fresh from attending the 2017 International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association convention and expo in Nashville, TN, here come the videos! Learn about new developments in the funeral industry on display at the exposition through the videos coming online through The Family Plot Blog and our YouTube channel. Upon entering the doors to the exposition hall, you immediately run into the greeting booth put together by FuneralOne. It's a...
Fun Photos from the ICCFA Convention
The annual convention and expo of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA) opened yesterday in Nashville, Tennessee. The event was originally slated to be held in Charlotte, North Carolina, but was moved when that state passed its "Bathroom Bill" discriminating against transgender people. Here are some fun photos taken at the expo on Wednesday. More to come soon...
April 23: ABQ Death Cafe
The next Albuquerque Death Cafe is scheduled for Sunday, April 23, from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Gail Rubin’s home. The objective of the Death Cafe is “To increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.” It’s an interesting, unstructured conversation – open and free-flowing with no specific agenda and respectful of all points of view. It’s an opportunity to discuss what’s on your mind or in...