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Blog Entry 37 of 80 Grave Concerns: Inside Grand View Memorial Park

News you can use regarding Grand View Memorial Park, Glendale, CA's oldest cemetery, which has been closed for regular business since June 13, 2006, due to legal and financial problems. Lisa Burks also runs the website GrandViewMemorialPark.info.

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Cemetery records woes include headstone inventory

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Contributed by: Lisa Burks on 4/6/2007

This week we've learned about a grave at Grand View Memorial Park that should have been empty but wasn't.

Now I'd like to tell you about two supposedly unmarked graves that, it turns out, were memorialized with headstones decades ago.

Sharon Hoyt lives out of state and has several relatives buried at Grand View. She recently took me up on my standing offer to valleynews.com readers to locate and photograph loved ones' graves when the cemetery grounds are open to the public on designated limited visitation Sundays.

She told me that in 2002 she had written to Grand View inquiring about four grave sites, and she showed me a copy of the professional, courteous letter she received back, on Oct. 29 that same year signed by cemetery employee Nancy Rivera, providing section, tier and grave number references for all four plots.

However, Rivera noted, "there's no marker for Edward & Mary Watry," located in Section D, Tier 15, Graves 9 and 10. Rivera added that arrangements would be made for a groundskeeper to escort Sharon to the locations should she ever decide to visit Grand View in person one day.

Sharon never made it to Grand View and her would-be tour guides are long gone, but she was still interested in finding out what happened to the Watry headstones since she had a copy of a nearly 30-year-old design order for Mary's marker.

"If there's no marker, I'll look into where it went and possibly order a new one," Sharon wrote in her initial e-mail.

My first guess was that perhaps their markers were among a group of old headstones discovered stored at Grand View earlier in the year.

According to court documents pertaining to a court-ordered document retrieval inspection at Grand View in February, and also per my follow up conversation with plaintiff attorney Paul Ayers who was present that day, numerous old headstones are stacked up inside the garage there. It will take an additional court order and more legal eagle wrangling to further investigate and document those headstones, so stay tuned for that story as it develops.

But it raised some interesting questions: what graves did they come from, why are they there and could the Watry headstones be among the stacks?

Tom Trimble (the late Marsha Howard's brother who worked at Grand View for many years and who is currently the administrator for her estate which includes majority ownership of cemetery) told me recently that there's nothing fishy about the graveless headstones.

He explained that it is not uncommon for some cemetery customers to order new headstones with a more modern look and inscription to replace an old, possibly damaged, original stone. One typical example he gave was when a surviving spouse whose partner had died many years before would decide to change the stone style, text font or complete wording on a shared headstone that would better reflect who they are today.

"The replaced headstones belong to the people who paid for them them, but most folks don't come to take them away so we just kept them in the garage," said Tom.
Without a list of names on the stored headstones, I had no way to find verify if Edward and Mary's stones were in the garage, so I had to let that possible angle drop for the time being.

Instead, I walked Section D row by row in search of the Watry plots using an old map of the grounds provided by the city of Glendale, which volunteers keep at the front entrance for the public to reference on limited visitation days. Following that map, which has been known to be inaccurate, I found markers for tiers leading up to but ending at 11, and within those tiers the grave numbers didn't match up with what was on the map.

After reporting my lack of findings to Sharon, she contacted the company which made Mary's marker and they were able to confirm for her that an in-ground, flat, black marker had been delivered to Grand View on January 24, 1980 and that it measured 24" x 12" which indicated that the stone would have been placed on a full-sized grave, opposed to a smaller cremation space.

Remarkably, the company's records also included details of how they matched the style of Mary's stone to that of her husband Edward's, which was vintage in nature having been placed in 1961, by taking a rubbing of his marker. At the very least, the manufacturer's notes confirmed the existence of Edward's marker around late 1979, at the time of Mary's death.

On my next visit to Grand View I came armed with newer, extremely detailed sectional maps registered with Los Angeles County in 2000 (thanks to Ayers, who saw to it that I was supplied with a complete 20-page set covering every inch of the grounds after I asked him how I should go about getting them myself from downtown archives.)

Consulting the sectional map for Section D, I quickly learned that tier markers 1-11 ran along the east end of the section, near the curb adjacent to Section L, and that they picked up again on the west end of the section, opposite the curb closer to Section M. Within minutes I found Tier 15 and several steps later I found markers for both Edward and Mary.

One of Sharon's original thoughts was that the graves had been overgrown and only appeared to be unmarked, but when I found them they were simply covered with leaves that had fallen from a nearby tree.

It only took me a few minutes to rake away the debris and wash them with water that I had brought in jugs before they once again saw the light of day. Neither marker was too worse for the wear, although the foundation around Mary's stone was cracked in several places.

I'm not alone in wondering why records referenced by Rivera in 2002 indicated that there were no stones for either Edward or Mary when clearly the markers have existed for years. Both burials took place under the ownership of the Hepburn family (1930s-1990), who have since been added to the list of defendants in the class action lawsuit along with the estate of Jack Grossman, of Grand View Partners (1990-1999).

This mystery may one day be solved by attorneys currently sifting through thousands of Grand View business papers in search of answers to mounting questions, and one that suggests that recordkeeping slip ups are not exclusive to the recent Marsha Howard- Moshe Goldsman ownership era.

Grand View's history dates back to late 1800s when it was classified as a "rural burial ground" prior to the existence of most formal state cemetery laws, so I'm beginning to learn not to let anything that surfaces there these day surprise me. The wider the scope of the investigations, the more interesting it gets.

At least, in this case, it's nice to report some good news, and a happy ending for Sharon Hoyt and her quest to confirm the existence of properly marked ancestral graves at Grand View.

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