Nineteenth-century Brazil underwent transformations in its funerary practices, shifting from burials inside churches to the interment of the dead in a new resting place: the cemetery. In Brazilian necropolises, new rituals, symbols, spatial arrangements, materialities, and perspectives on death and the deceased were developed, while certain practices also continued. Recife, located in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, was one of the first cities to implement this new model for the place of the dead, producing a vast materiality that can be investigated to understand the intertwined funerary and social changes within the cemetery. This research, therefore, seeks to understand the relationship between burial forms and the symbols used to establish the memory of the deceased to whom the structure refers, by employing the concepts of ‘primary burial’ and ‘secondary burial’. It aims to determine if there is a difference between the symbols used for primary and secondary burials, and whether this distinction also appears in relation to gender or age. To this end, the Senhor Bom Jesus da Redenção Cemetery is used as a case study, with the analysis focusing on its first fifty years of operation (1851-1900), a period during which Brazil experienced significant social changes.