Dalton decided that her long interest in epitaphs and tombstones would be worth an investigation for a folklore course. She included the text of the epitaph and, for many of the tombstones, images of the grave marker; she divided the kinds of epitaphs in the following categories philosophies, brief candles, memento mori, sermons on stone, tribute to dead, and victims of chance and circumstance. Project was created for an English 391 course taught at Brigham Young University in 1969.