This paper examines the production and exchange of funerary photographs in which family and community members posed with the deceased in early 20th Century Appalachia, and how and why this practice, initially associated with the Victorian period across Euro and Anglo-American contexts (Crissman 1995; Ruby 1999), expanded through the mid to late 20th and early 21st Centuries between Appalachian diasporic communities in the industrial Midwest and their family and community members who remained ‘at home.’

Building on Fraser's (2023) recent work on under researched patterns of what he refers to as ‘Transappalachian’ migration in the 20th Century, and utilizing theoretical frameworks from Edwards and Hart (2004) which established the necessity of understanding photographs as objects in their own right rather than valuing them solely for their image content, I will examine how their materiality and relational properties were and are central to the ritual exchange of these artifacts between families that maintain familial and community ties across time and space for those separated by economic migration. I also explore how this remains a distinctive cultural practice within Appalachia and the Appalachian diaspora, adding to work by Ruby (1995), Laderman (2003) and more recent work by Dawdy (2021) on the evolution of death practices in the United States over the last three centuries.