Forest Lawn Cemetery

On Saturday, August 14, my sister and took a trip to Forest Lawn in Glendale, CA. We went to find the grave of our great uncle Bill's second wife, Edith. She died in 1959 and is buried there with her parents and siblings. In an earlier post I said I'd address this trip. Here goes.

Not only did we venture out there to find and photograph Edith's grave (and her family), but we thought we'd honor some of the photo requests for Forest Lawn on a fabulous website called Findagrave.com. Why not, I've actually added two photo requests myself, plus, I was going there so I was in a position to "help" someone out.

The Forest Lawn website has a great index of grave locations, yet no maps. Hmm. We got there. It was hot and there were a few funerals going on. We stopped upon arrival at the info booth and asked for maps (none online) and got a map of the cemetery. This map showed the locations in the cemetery of the various plots, but did not, like Inglewood Park Cemetery, have maps of the plots that showed the locations of the graves!

So, we wasted so much time walking through plots, in the heat, up steep hills, attempting to read ancient markers to determine if we were anywhere close to the location within the plot we needed to be. What a challenge and what a realization that I'm out of shape. This was tough. I couldn't believe that this big chain called Forest Lawn, had such poor map options! After much sweat, panting, and just getting nowhere, we decided to head back to the info booth for help. What we got was a very helpful employee that attempted to give us a photocopy of the area of the plot where the graves we were looking for were located.

Needless to say, this did not really include the street names within the cemetery and was just not helpful. We'll have to go back for another attempt. In my humble opinion, this HUGE chain and HUGE cemetery should really get up to speed with their maps. Can that really be so hard? Looks like I'm going to have to call FL and suggest they check out Inglewood Parks website for help.