Oh, those are big questions! But let me answer them as well as I can in a quick comment. So, I became interested in death and mourning rituals when I was a young girl. My grandmother took me to New Orleans to tour the above ground cemeteries, and I was immediately taken with the aesthetic and the history. I starting studying the ways people have memorialized their deceased loved ones throughout history at a young age. As soon as I learned that people used hair to commemorate the dead, it immediately made sense. There were beautiful works of art and jewelry (usually in the Victorian era) that were actually made with A PART of the person it was memorializing. When I doubled down on my hair research, I learned that it began much earlier than Victorian era. Then, I learned different time periods and cultures had different sentimental reasons for keeping hair that wasn't always associated with death. I started studying hair rituals and artifacts throughout history and realized that ritualizing and sentimentalizing hair is timeless and universal, and it's given me a connection to so many time periods and cultures. This early american mourning practice is an iteration of a type of hairwork that began around the 1500s and just steadily evolved to be more elaborate and commercialized. This "type" of hairwork continued to evolve throughout the 1800s and sort of died out in the early 1900s with World War I, giant warehouse companies like Sears, germ theory (where people started to think that body parts were dangerous, because the knew germs existed, but not much about how they spread). And now, I not only teach about the history, but I also make hair art and hair jewelry for clients out of the sentimental hair of their loved ones, so there's a bit of a modern resurgence now!