BOYERTOWN, Pa. -- Some people knit. Others garden or collect coins.

But Betty J. Burdan's hobby might be considered a bit idiosyncratic.

The 60-year-old Douglass Township, Berks County, woman collects funeral memorabilia.

In her study, she keeps a three-ring binder filled with turn-of-the-century funeral notices and Victorian funeral mementos. Another binder contains photocopied information on American funeral customs, and she even has the accounting book of a Victorian headstone carver whose work graces Charles Evans Cemetery in Reading and other period cemeteries.

Friends know when traveling to send her pictures of unusual or unique tombstones they encounter.

"I probably have more pictures of tombstones than anybody in the world," she said, laughing.

She has been working to restore a small burial ground near her home where many Revolutionary War soldiers are buried.

She even has an old tombstone from a family ancestor, a tombstone she found discarded at the workshop of the carver, who replaced it in her garden.

"It's just a hobby," she said. "I've never been into knitting or crocheting."

She knows it might be looked on as macabre, but she said the stories contained in the items she collects and the cemeteries she explores are stories about how people lived, tragedies of families who lost children and all the other human dramas of ordinary people whose lives are mostly forgotten they are what drew the amateur local historian into her fascination with "funerary everything."

As a longtime genealogist, she knows that few items left behind contain such concrete information about the deceased as the headstone left to commemorate their lives.

"They are such marvelous historical places," she said about the cemeteries she visits, calling them "great historical libraries."

Though she ties her interest in with her hobbies of genealogy and local history, maybe, she said, such things are in her blood.

"There is something genetic in it," she said. "My grandfather was a caretaker of a cemetery for 60 years."

She remembers visiting him as a child, and the stories he'd tell about going to the cemetery at night, dressed all in white with white hair and a beard to scare kids who had sneaked in, or about how while digging graves in the summer heat, he would lie in the shade and coolness of the graves to rest, then startle people by suddenly standing up.

"Going to see grandma and grandpa meant going to visit the cemetery," she said. "So cemeteries weren't so scary to me."

The seeds of interest planted during her childhood germinated as her own children grew up.

A small statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of embalming, looks over the study where Burdan keeps her collections of local histories, church records and funerary items.

It was a gift from her daughter, Amanda Burdan, 30, in remembrance of a report on Egypt that the two of them researched while Amanda was in seventh grade.

"Just about everything regarding it was about their funerary [customs]," said Amanda Burdan, a doctoral candidate at Brown University.

But when another relative introduced Burdan to genealogy years later, poring over old documents, obituaries, church and cemetery records, and, yes, cemeteries that goes with it, her interest in the funereal really took off.

She explained the purpose behind the funeral cards in her collection, which date from the Victorian era to mid-20th century and which she has found in flea markets, auctions and even the eBay auction Web site.

The newer cards, a few inches wide and across and dating from the first half of the 20th century, were invitations to funerals dating to an era when fewer people lived in small, close-knit rural communities, but before daily newspapers with their obituaries and funeral notices became the norm.

"When somebody died, the family and community had to be notified," she said to explain their purpose. "When newspapers became daily newspapers, and they got to everybody, then things like funeral cards faded out."

The older, more ornate Victorian cards in her collection, made from thick black or white cardboard slightly larger than a typical photograph, with glossy gold lettering, illustrations and poems resembling greeting card verses, were less utilitarian, serving as funeral mementos from an era when death was romanticized.

Close family members might take away more personal mementos, such as jewelry containing locks of the deceased's hair.

Burdan's favorite cemeteries, too, date from Victorian times.

Before that time, she said, most people were buried in a small family burial ground or on church grounds.

"It was only in the Victorian age, when they got the public cemetery, that they started to romanticize the burial ground," she said. "Before that, a lot of the cemeteries were crude."

She explained that, for the Victorians, cemeteries were public parks as well as burial grounds, such as the Charles Evans Cemetery in Reading, which is an arboretum and has areas for picnicking.

The grounds also became a reflection of society, with more affluent families commissioning elaborate headstones for the deceased.

"It is such a reflection of the society of the day," she said. "I don't spend much time in a cemetery that was made later than 1925."

But just because she spends a lot of time in cemeteries, exploring and recording their history, doesn't mean she's immune to the heebie-jeebies.

She said she usually takes a friend with her and was especially glad of it on the day when she fell into a collapsed grave.

She was kneeling in front of a tombstone, something she said she usually didn't do, out of respect, unless the tombstone is illegible from any farther away, when her leg fell into a sinkhole that had developed under the ground.

"I was so terrified that I came out of that hole like a Jack Russell terrier," she said. "I do walk gingerly around those graves now."

She said she didn't want people to misunderstand her interest in the funereal.

"I'm not a ghoul," she said. "It doesn't take a ghoul to love cemeteries."

Much of her interest is on the Fritz Burial Ground, Douglass Township, founded as a private burial ground around 1750, but later opened up to Calvinists and Lutherans. It's the only surviving burial ground from the era in the township.

The burial ground, which she has been working to restore, is the final resting place of some of the founders of Douglass Township and at least six Revolutionary War soldiers.

And Burdan has passed on some of her interest to her daughter, who helped kindle Burdan's interest years ago.

Amanda, an art historian, has researched Pennsylvania Dutch funerary art and passed some of that on to her students at Brown, the Rhode Island School of Design and Roger Williams University.

Although she eventually decided against focusing on funerary art for her dissertation, she said, her mother's experience with genealogy and cemeteries has helped her in her research into post-Civil War American women artists, most of whose lives are undocumented except through their graves, church records and other tools of the genealogy trade.

Burdan stressed that her interest in funeral customs and remains rests in her love of local history, a related passion of hers.

"I'm walking on the same place that these events occurred," she said to explain her interest. "The more you learn, the more there is to learn. The more answers you get, the more questions there are."