Soul effigy

Boston carvers began cutting a fleshy, smiling face with wings in the 1690s. Historians call it a winged cherub or soul effigy and usually read it as the soul's flight to heaven, a gentler image than the skull. By about 1800 nearly half of the stones in one large New England sample carried a winged face.

The old story that cherubs simply replaced skulls as Puritan belief softened is disputed: in Boston the death's head stayed more common, and the change does not line up neatly with any religious revival. Many effigies wear crowns, a sign of the glory of life after death.