The Ambrose funeral home will soon celebrate its 25th anniversary at its Lansdowne location, one of two funeral home facilities owned and operated by the Ambrose family as part of its Ambrose Funeral Home and Cremation Services.
The decision to open a second location in addition to the Arbutus location was made in 1990, said Sean Ambrose, a fourth-generation part-owner of the company and one of 10 family members who range in age from 72 to 18 currently involved in the business.
Since opening the new facility on Hammonds Ferry Road, the company has seen half of its business come from that site.
Today, the family business offers funeral services and cremations out of both funeral homes, Ambrose said.
And it's been successful so far. In addition to the Lansdowne home's silver anniversary, next year will mark the 80th anniversary of the family business, and the 70th anniversary at the Arbutus location on Sulphur Spring Road.
The Ambrose family's business, which today serves about one family a day in southwest Baltimore County, has its roots in the Great Depression as more than just your average funeral service provider, Ambrose said. Looking for a way to make a little bit of money, one Ambrose patriarch who happened to own a pair of hearses in West Virginia decided to split his time, transporting bodies for burial and delivering moonshine to the urban centers of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Ambrose said.
Years later, the family moved to Baltimore and decided to go into the comparatively more wholesome business of funerals. In 1936, the family opened its first funeral home on Cross and Dexter streets in the city's Pigtown neighborhood, Ambrose said.
From there, the family moved west, to Franklintown Road, before eventually settling the business on Sulphur Spring Road in Arbutus in 1946, he said.
In a region of the county where everyone seems to know everyone, it is nearly impossible to find someone who doesn't know an Ambrose or the Ambrose Funeral Home and Cremation Services company, Ambrose said.
Today, the company is operated by a host of family members, including Sean Ambrose, Joseph F. Ambrose, Sean Ambrose's father and president and funeral director, Joseph F. Ambrose, Jr. Sean's brother and vice president, Barbara Stubbs Ambrose, Joseph Richard "J.R." Ambrose, Allison Knowles Ambrose, Christopher Peltz, Allison Peltz, Milton Greffen and Douglas Stubbs.
Growing up an Ambrose, he said, was a unique adventure in Arbutus, where his grandparents lived with his great-grandmother above the Arbutus funeral home.
While he said he has a friend who can remember him saying he always thought he'd end up in the family business, Ambrose said, "I felt like I came in kicking and screaming."
"It just was," he said. "Thanksgivings and Christmases were spent at the funeral home."
As a 26-year-old coming into the family business in 1997, Ambrose admits he had some reservations. Set on living life as he chose and in the middle of studying acupuncture, he only got involved in the funeral home when his father became ill and his mother asked him to run the business for a little while, he said.
To his surprise, he loved it, so much so that when his mother told him that his father wasn't going to come, he decided to take over with his older brother, Joe Ambrose Jr.
By 1990, the business was getting too big for its Arbutus location, so the family decided to purchase an old hair studio and pharmacy at the corner of Hammonds Ferry Road and Third Avenue in Lansdowne in order to offer individuals living east of Arbutus a more convenient location.
The addition to the second funeral home is not all that's changed about the family business over the years, Ambrose said.
For one thing, the industry itself has changed so much that the family business changed its name from Ambrose Funeral Home to include the increasing popularity of cremation.
When he received his mortician's license in 1997, Ambrose estimates that about 7 percent of the family's business was cremations. Today, he said, cremation accounts for nearly half of all the family's work.
They are even in the process of attaining the permits necessary to do their own on-site cremations.
"Funerals, when I was a kid, used to be so cookie cutter," he said. In recent years though, adding personal touches to services and viewings has been a growing trend, something Ambrose funeral homes don't mind integrating into their offerings.
They have been known to allow families to set up tailgates in their parking lot so that viewing attendees may eat. It's that flexibility, Sean Ambrose says, that has allowed his family's business to last for so long.
"I don't have the million-dollar property. I don't have the pristine location," Ambrose said. But "we service people."
"I'm here to do whatever [the customer] wants," he continued. "Whatever you can think of, I'll do."
Unlike some other funeral service providers, Ambrose said, family-owned and operated homes usually have a very close connection to the community in which they work, something that can be both good and bad. For example, he said, family friends prefer to hold loved ones' services in a place they know, with the help of a company they are familiar with. But even after almost two decades in the industry, it can be difficult to separate the job from the emotions.
"I don't have that," he said of the ability some in the funeral business have to block their feelings at emotional services. "I can't do that."
Hostess Carole Smith, who has been working part-time at Ambrose Funeral Homes for five years, said she decided to begin working in the funeral business soon after her husband died. Having had a difficult time with the loss, she said she was looking for something to occupy her when a friend told her about a opening at Ambrose for a host.
"Then I knew how important it is to help someone," she said. So she applied for the job. "I'm alone," she said she thought to herself. "I can do some good somewhere."
Since her first day, when she admits she had no idea what she was getting into, the Ambrose family has become like a second family, Smith said. At every service or viewing she works, she said, she is there to help with anything the family might need, whether that be coffee or tissues or anything else.
At the end of almost every service, there are plenty of hugs, she said.
"It's just so family-oriented," she said. "Everybody's so wonderful."