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OXFORD — There was a time when families had a more hands-on approach to burying its dead.

"Taking care of the deceased was much closer to the family, which was more intensely involved with the funeral," said Stephen Gordon, director of the McGuffey Museum at Miami University. "Today, we just hire a funeral home."

The McGuffey Museum's mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit materials relating to the life of William Holmes McGuffey , an early Miami professor famous for the McGuffey Eclectic Reader series.

To that end, Gordon and his staff and volunteers have assembled "Mourning and Memories" to explore how families mourned and celebrated the lives of their deceased during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

"McGuffey and his wife lost several children and there has been at least three funerals in the parlor of this home," Gordon said.

Among the artifacts are post-mortem photos and paintings.

"People look back at this and think it's a strange custom" to take a photo of a dead body, Gordon said. "We think maybe the reason it was done was because there was never a photo taken of the person."

A key artifact in the exhibition is a posthumous mourning portrait of 3-year-old Louis Fitton, son of Hamilton residents Thomas and Eliza Brant Fitton, painted around 1866-70 and attributed to George White (1826-91), a native of Oxford who became the first Miami student to make a career as an artist.

"White lived his adult life in Hamilton and was the premiere artist in the area at that time period," Gordon said.

There is also a portrait of Queen Victoria, who wore a mourning dress the last 40 years of her life, recognizing her contribution to mourning practices.

"She did not invent or innovate mourning customs, but she made them more visible," Gordon said.

The exhibition includes a mannequin wearing the elaborate mourning clothes of a woman from the era.

"Women would wear black for a year as a sign to the community that she lost a loved one," Gordon said. "She would wear a veil for the first month, then after a year would add certain colors — lavender, shades of purple or gray — to show that she was coming out of mourning."

The exhibition includes a photograph from one of the three known funerals to take place in the parlor of the McGuffey house, that of Donald Beard, an Oxford native who died at age 27 in 1919 in Arkansas and whose body was shipped back to Oxford for burial.

The exhibition also features a panel on the most recent funeral in the house, the 1935 viewing of Wallace "Pat" Roudebush, who died of an infection after being cut while away on summer camp.

Perhaps the most bizarre — by current standards anyway — customs addressed in the exhibition is the practice of creating hairwork jewelry from the hair of the deceased.

"It was quite common in the 19th century for women to have items of human hair as jewelry and accessories," Gordon said. "It allowed you to keep a part of your loved one close to you."

Wearing hairwork jewelry wasn't strictly a mourning custom, but a common accessory practice.

"It was popular from the 1830s until about 1910, said McGuffey Museum staff and Miami faculty member Helen Sheumaker , whose book, "Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America," was released last month.

"It was introduced in Paris in the 1770s as a fashion, then picked up in England before arriving in this country," she said.

It was such a common practice to have brooches, pins and rings made from the hair of a loved one that Sears-Roebuck and Montgomery Ward offered hairwork in their catalogs in the 1870s.

"There were also published directions available for women to make their own, but it was extremely time consuming and difficult," Sheumaker said

Hairwork was profoundly social and deeply personal, she said. Mourning hairwork was fashionable and sentimental.

To contemporary sensibilities, hairwork seems a bit, well, icky.

"The reaction we have to it today is why it fell out of fashion," Sheumaker said. "Styles changed and it no longer looked good with people's clothing, but also by 1910 there was a touch of irony, that it was something old ladies did. It started to be seen as morbid even though a generation earlier it didn't have that feeling at all for people."