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2006 Funeral Service Survey
Funeral Consumers Alliance of Eastern Massachusetts conducted a survey
of all Massachusetts funeral establishments in January 2006.
Questions were particularly related to the funeral home’s willingness
and ability to work with members of The Funeral Consumers Alliance and
other consumers in providing non-traditional services to those who are
interested in taking a more significant role in final disposition of
their loved one.
We are seeking additional funeral homes to recommend
to consumers seeking such customized services.
A cover letter
explaining the goals of the survey was personally addressed to the
Director of
each Funeral Establishment.
The survey form posed
several questions on Non Traditional Funeral Service Options and also
asked for a copy of their General Price List.
Responses are posted below in two different ways.
Each list is an
HTML table sorted by zip code then by city or town. The first
column contains a link to the response or other info on that funeral
home. Other columns contain the business name and address.
The last column is the official Establishment Number, which we used to
make the filenames for the response info. We sorted by zip code
because of the confusing way town and village names are used in
Massachusetts.
You can search the lists by town or funeral home name using
the "Find" function of your browser.
Almost all the responses are
PDF image files, for which you need either Acrobat Reader or
GhostScript add-in for your browser.
- A table
of only the funeral homes which responded or for which we have
other information, with links to the information.
- The complete table
of all Massachusetts funeral homes, with links to their
responses or other information.
Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association sent this Alert about our survey via fax to
all their members.
Comments
on the Alert from Joshua Slocum, Executive Director of Funeral
Consumers Alliance (our national federation).
We are delighted that there are at least some funeral homes willing to
serve those who seek non-traditional services and hope that this
information will help people to locate them.
Our 1998 Price Survey can provide
some historical context. It
didn't ask about non-traditional services.
For the mailing list we used the official Funeral Establishment
Database dated November 28, 2005 from the Division of Professional
Licensure .
Here is the whole database as a
CSV file which you can import to any spreadsheet or database
program. It includes 639 "current" and 81"expired"
listings.
Here is a ZIP file
of the entire content of the CD the DPL sent. Be warned that
the MS Access MDB file is set by DPL so it can only be viewed, not
printed, saved or edited. The only thing that worked was the
extraction program, "PIR.exe", which did create the above CSV
file.
It wouldn't make an XLS file, as it claimed.
In 2003 we received an earlier DPL database which they maintained from
1999 to 2003 but then abandoned. It contains names of the other
licensed or registered employees at each funeral home, not of just the
director (manager) as in the 2005 database. Note that the
Establishment Number in the 2003 database bears no relationship to that
number in the 2005 database.
ZIP file of 2003 database.
[updated 2007-07-01]
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