The New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association was organized in May 1902 in Trenton, a historic event the association celebrates this year as it officially turns 120 years old.
But is the association’s age really 120? Or is there a possibility it’s a bit older?
The answer lies in whether you consider formal organization the association’s birth date (as the NJSFDA does) or if you think that any other gatherings where the same name was used indicate an older group.
Evidence exists that 19th century undertakers had been gathering as the “New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association” as early as 1889 and possibly before then. The April 12, 1889 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer details when a group of funeral directors gathered at the Taylor Opera House in Trenton to take action “on the committee appointed at a prior meeting to draft a constitution and bylaws.”
Why it took 13 more years for the NJSFDA to officially begin operations is not recorded, but the 1889 meeting was not without incident.
A man claiming to be a reporter, bribed a janitor in the building with $5, sneaked into the hall’s loft and took notes as the meeting got underway. The attendants soon discovered him and called the police, who responded and questioned the man, who claimed he was from Philadelphia.
An April 21, 1889 story in the Cincinnati Enquirer said the man admitted that “he was an agent for an installment burial concern.”
“The association, after hissing him, agreed to allow him to go on his way,” the paper stated.
Fithian S. Simmons, a Camden funeral director and the early association’s president, explained to the Philadelphia Times in 1889 that the association was concerned with “the personal improvement of its members in the way of securing a knowledge of the anatomy of the body and how to handle dead bodies.” He said that “none but thoroughly competent men are admitted.”
Old newspaper articles also show that the early association had been holding yearly conventions well before 1902. A November 1891 article in The Morning Post of Camden states that the association was going to be holding its third annual convention at the Concordia Hall in Trenton.
The 1891 convention featured the kind of speakers that would still be welcomed at an NJSFDA event in 2022. Dr. E.M. Hunt of the state Board of Health, was scheduled to speak on sanitary matters. R.R. Bringhurst, president of the International Funeral Directors Association spoke, and a “lecture and practical demonstration on embalming” was going to be delivered by Professor A. Renouard of the United States College of Embalming.
NJSFDA President and CEO George R. Kelder Jr., CFSP, says the old stories show that funeral directors were concerned about the integrity of their profession in the 1800s as well as now.
The early association may have been a previous iteration of the statewide association. A gap in information from old newspaper articles appears from 1893 to 1902, when reports detailing the first meeting of the still-existing NJSFDA appear.
An officer at that meeting, during which George Stevens of Jersey City was named president, “called attention to the evils undertakers who conduct ‘legitimate funerals’ are forced to combat.”
That remains a concern for funeral directors to this day, Kelder said.
Today’s conventions focus on education as well, a need for which prompted a warning from Bringhurst at a March 1889 meeting of the early association. According to an article in the Evening Gazette of Pittston, PA, Bringhurst sounded an alarm for the future of the funeral industry if it did not adapt:
“He said the gentlemen had no foes to fight but their own ignorance and their own inability to size up things, and keep abreast of the times.”
If you have any information on the early days of the association that could shed more light on the formation of the NJSFDA, please feel free to contact jschoonejongen@njsfda.org.