Friday, August 23, 2013

A Visit to Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego

I had a cemetery gravestone photo query task to do today, and visited Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego.  The USGenWeb Archives has several thousand gravestone transcriptions available in http://www.usgwarchives.net/ca/sandiego/cemeteries.html.  Find A Grave has 23,940 interments listed at Mount Hope Cemetery, but only 49 are photographed.

I always go to the cemetery office when it is open, because they have a computer catalog of their interments, and they provide a map to help the inquirer find the section of the cemetery and then the plot.  My great-grandfather, Charles Auble (1849-1916) is buried in Mount Hope, and I found his gravesite (without a gravestone) and wrote about it in Tombstone Tuesday - Charles Auble (1849-1916) in San Diego (posted 1 November 2011).

Today, I was looking for the gravestone of Ann E. Stephen-Hassard (1875-1949) and Edward M. Stephen-Hassard (1873-1954) buried in Mount Hope Cemetery.  My queryist had found them in the USGenWeb Archives index as Ann E. Hassard and Edward M. Stephen.  

Here is an image of the the map I received at the office of Mount Hope Cemetery:




On the top half of the page, is a map of the entire cemetery and a listing of the information for Edward Maxwell Stephen-Hassard.  The office clerk told me that Ann Elliott Stephen-Hassard was in the same plot.  They are buried in the Masonic division, Section D, Lot 5, Grave 14.

Below the office information for the deceased person, there is a list of 21 "neighbors" of the Stephen-Hassards.  On the bottom half of the map, there is a closeup map (oriented up is north) that shows grave locations with the desired locations denoted by a star in the middle of the map.  13 of the "neighbors" are also shown on this map.  The Stephen-Hassard stone is between neighbor 18 to the north, 9 to the south, 5 to the west and 7 to the east.

The clerk told me how to get to the area which was on King Solomon Drive between Sections C and J.  I found the area, but the different divisions and sections are not well marked.  I wandered around for awhile, looking for familiar names from the "neighbor" list.  I finally found #14 August S. Schrey with a large above-ground stone, saw #15 and #16 (Earl and Ida Solwick), and was able to see the Stephen-Hassard stone in the ground nearby.  There was lots of overgrown grass around the edges so I pulled some of it, and there was dead mown grass on the face of the stone so I wiped that off.  The area had been watered fairly recently, and some of the stone that was under the grass was damp.  The stone was in the shade of a large tree with some sun peeking through, but by standing above the stone I was able to get a decent picture without any shadows.

Here is the best picture I took of the stone with my iPhone.





As you can see, the people who indexed the gravestones online were easily confused by the hyphenated last name on the gravestone.

I spent some time taking pictures in the Masonic Division of the cemetery because that is where the first burials in this particular cemetery are.

I really like the friendliness and helpfulness of the office folks at Mount Hope Cemetery, and really appreciate their map that shows the exact grave location and the "neighbors."  I thought my readers might enjoy seeing the map to the target gravesite.

After I took the pictures, while driving home, I thought to myself "you know, you really should have used the Billion Graves app on the iPhone to take these pictures."  Oh well, maybe next time.  I need to practice with it a bit also.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/08/a-visit-to-mount-hope-cemetery-in-san.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Did you leave the percent sign off of your description of the number of photographed graves at Mount Hope on Find A Grave? You wrote that only 49 had been photographed. The page you linked to shows that 50% of the listings have been photographed. Either the percent sign was left off of your blog entry or someone there has uploaded +/- 12,000 photos since your entry dated August 23.