Local funeral home reopens their doors.

Planning for a funeral can be overwhelming, dealing with the loss of a loved one, and being left with hefty funeral expenses. Today, Barham Funeral Home Forrest Lawn Chapel reopened their doors and plan on making a difference, in serving Meridian and Lauderdale County.

“When you show up to the funeral home for the visitation, and then you come for the service, we go straight out of the chapel and then we go into the cemetery, so it’s just a huge convenience for families. I guess you can say we’re a one-stop for everything, here you can buy your cemetery property, you can get your marker for your cemetery grave, you can do all the funeral services,everything under one roof. You don’t have to go to two or three different places to get that done, we can take care of that for you here.”

With so many services offered at one location, it helps families to remain at ease according to Tew.

“The main part, is the convenience of having a funeral home on sight with the cemetery and that just offers a convenience to a family of not having to move between different locations, and worry about you know, does somebody have a vehicle, do we need to get a limo, just different things like that, you don’t worry about that here.”

Tew says the funeral home was originally run by one family.

“The original funeral home was built by Mr. OC Barham and his family and they operated the business here on the cemetery up until the mid-1990’s, and they sold the business to a corporation.”

Joe Tews says, there was a purpose to be served in getting the funeral home reopened.

“In November, we went into talks with the company that owns the business and decided that we were interested in the business, and ended up buying it, and reopened the funeral home really toward the end of January, and we’ve been trying to get everything going since then.”