If you were to take a tour of Madison's Forest Hill cemetery, you might come across an old wooden board, one you would pass by without notice on your own. That board represents the last wooden grave marker in the cemetery — or, at least it did a year ago when I last toured the cemetery.

Cemeteries, particularly old cemeteries, are among the most interesting tourist sites of any community because they combine within them the history of the populace and the history of the popular cultures of their towns.

Author Marilyn Yalom and photographer Reid Yalom take their readers on a tour of cemeteries nationwide in "The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds" (Houghton Mifflin: $30). It is a fascinating tour, one that begins with a definition of the word "cemetery."

"The word 'cemetery' crept into popular language during the 19th century, along with a new concept of funeral landscape. After two centuries of grim, gray, urban graveyards, the new philosophy called for expansive rural vistas enhanced by carefully chosen flora and artful monuments. The dead could find peace in such settings and mourners too could take comfort in nature's bounties. 'Cemetery,' derived from the Greek 'koimeterium' meaning 'a place to sleep,' was the right term for fields of eternal rest."

It was also in the 19th century that tombstones began to carry epitaphs, such as "He was an honest man," Yalom reports. Children, however, often merited no stone at all "given the high infant mortality rates and the sense that an infant had not yet developed a distinctive personality."

Yalom also takes her readers on a tour of famous cemeteries, including Bellefontiane Cemetery in St. Louis, where one can find a tombstone with a carving of a riverboat captain, Isaiah Sellers, who navigated the Mississippi River and who ordered his monument before he died and kept it with him in his travels.

Cemeteries for African-Americans, Yalom notes, often identified the deceased by only his first name and, by the name of his master. In fact, a researcher in St. Louis learned that there is only one inscribed marker in St. Louis County for an African American who died before the Civil War; other blacks were buried in unmarked graves.

No discussion of burial grounds could omit New Orleans, where high groundwater levels necessitate above-ground burial. Yalom calls the result "ovenlike vaults" in which coffins are placed on upper shelves. "These tombs could be closed and sealed and then reopened at later date to introduce another body. By that time, the earlier coffin and corpse would have disintegrated and the bones could be swept through a small grate into the lower chamber, thus providing space for a new coffin."

Since several generations of a family can be thus entombed in the same container, New Orleans has also developed a custom of having family reunions at the tomb on All Saints Day.

Perhaps the oddest story in this book, however, is Yalom's discussion of an 18th-century practice in New England of giving burial gloves to mourners.

"Once the pair of gloves had been received, the recipient was obliged to attend the funeral, almost as if he had been served a court summons. He or she would put on the gloves and other symbols of mourning — a black ribbon, a black armband, a black cloak — and join the funeral cortege that began at the home or the church where the dead person had been laid out," Yalom writes.

Often at the feast following the burial, mourners also received rings, scarves, even silver spoons: "With all these expenses, wealthy people could expect to spend as much as 20 percent of the deceased person's estate on a suitable funeral."