Forest Lawn Glendale Section Pages History & FAQs


History
Page Layouts
How to send updates
How to send bulk updates
Where to send updates
Burials that are not listed
Other help and supported formats
Anomalies and discrepancies
Updating sections on website
What's New

History

The Forest Lawn Listings By Section Pages are an outgrowth of the Forest Lawn Project, which I started in late 2011. The Forest Lawn Project has been an attempt to document as many burials and inurnments as possible at Forest Lawn Glendale (I also did a great deal of work with five other cemeteries in the Forest Lawn chain, but have turned most of those Find A Grave memorials over to other people and have been focusing almost all of my efforts on Forest Lawn Glendale).

As time has passed more and more people have joined in The Project, and it became evident to me that the information I had in the database I created from combining information from the Forest Lawn website with information from the California Death Indexes, Social Security Death Index, and Find A Grave website, needed to be disseminated in a wider fashion so that other people would have access to the most critical information I had in the database, whether there were Find A Grave memorials for those entries or not.

I started publishing the section listings in December of 2013. They are organized by the Forest Lawn section names (obviously), and within the sections they are organized either by lot and space or in some cases by space and then lot, for some of the oddly organized sections. Organizing the names in this fashion makes it possible (in general) to see which people are buried or inurned next to each other, which is useful since in many cases family members are buried near each other.

Page Layouts

The columns in the listings are as follows:

The People ID (this is a completely arbitrary number but it is the unique id for each people record in my database). If I have this ID number it goes to one and only one people record and I can go right to that record and update it with no other information required.

The name of the person who is buried in that location, surname first, then first and middle names. Sometimes these names are misspelled because they were misspelled on the Forest Lawn website where I got the list of most of the names from.

Birth year, if known. Sometimes this is not the exact year but a guess based on ages found in the death indexes or in census records. (Update: See the What's New near the bottom of the page for more details, as of October 2014 I have started adding full dates when available to the pages as I republish them).

Death year, if known. The Forest Lawn website typically did not list death years for people who died before 1935, and in some cases does not list death years even for people who died after 1934. In some cases there is a marker photo but the marker doesn't show the death date, so unless someone goes to the trouble of calling the cemetery and finding out the date for that person, or doing other research to find out that information, it will continue to be unknown. (Note: Ditto for the death dates, I am adding the full dates on those as well as I republish the section listings).

Find A Grave memorial number, if known. If I have identified a Find A Grave memorial for that person, I have generated a clickable link that will take you to the memorial for that person. If it is blank there still may be a memorial for that person, I just haven't identified it and linked it to that person's record.

Photographed column and No Marker column. These can both be blank, but they should never both be checked (true) for the same person. A marker is either photographed (meaning there is a Find A Grave memorial with a marker photo posted) or it is listed as Unmarked because there is no marker. These fields are mostly accurate (better than 99% across the board) but there are a few cases in which a person is wrongly identified as being photographed when there is no marker photo, and I am sure there are a few people who are listed as having no marker who actually have a marker, but there shouldn't be many like this.

The Lot and Space fields. In Forest Lawn typically graves are arranged by lots and then by spaces. Within the mausoleums (Freedom Mausoleum and the Great Mausoleum) typically the lot is 0 and the space number is a number that can range between 1 and some number in the tens of thousands range. This numbering scheme also applies to some of the outside columbaria or sanctuaries such as in the Dawn of Tomorrow or some of the Garden or Court sections. In the ground sections the Lot numbers can range from 1 to a number in the thousands or tens of thousands, but in most cases the spaces will run from 1 into the 20s range. Some of the older sections have very odd numbering schemes where the lots are listed as "88888 Tier" followed by a letter or number and the spaces can range from 1 into the hundreds.

The Email Us column is an email link that will open a compose email window on your computer with the person's people ID entered automatically into the subject line of the email. This link can be used to inquire about a person or to send us more information about them.

How to send updates

How the pages can be used to send me updates

If you just have an update for one person, the easiest thing to do is to go to the line where their name is listed and click on the "Email us" link, then fill out any missing information in the message body and hit the send button. This is also fine for name corrections, changing incorrect information such as wrong dates, noting that a marker has been photographed or that there is no marker, or sending me a Find A Grave memorial where I have none listed or sending me a different memorial number when you have found a memorial that appears to predate the one I have listed.

That is the simplest way to send updates and if you just have a few updates or corrections it works fine.

How to send bulk updates

There is another way of sending updates, this works best if you are doing a lot of work in a particular section. If you are working a section and have gone through it systematically (typically by rows, which is usually the easiest way to work the outside sections) or if you are doing a lot of work on a columbarium or sanctuary in one of the mausoleums, you can copy the entire listing for that section or the part of that section you are working on and paste it into a spreadsheet. You can also do this if you plan on working that section and want to have a printout to take to the cemetery so you know which names you are looking for and which people for sure have marker photos and markers as opposed to ones that may not have marker photos or are verified as unmarked.

Once you have created the spreadsheet with the names and other information you are working on, go ahead and delete the column that has the "email us" listings, those are useless for what you are doing now.

You can use the information in your spreadsheet to go through the photos you took and post them to the correct memorials on Find A Grave. As you do that, you can put the word "TRUE" into the photographed column on every line where you posted a marker photo where there was none before. If you are sure there is no marker for a grave, put the word "TRUE" into the no marker column instead.

What works best on my end is that these spreadsheets be used to add missing information, not to try and change existing information. The exception here is the Find A Grave memorial numbers. If you find another memorial number that matches the person's name, go ahead and send me that memorial number within the spreadsheet. I will go ahead and compare the two entries and if the memorial number you sent is earlier than the one I have listed, I will make arrangements to have the later memorial merged into the earlier one or deleted. If you sent a memorial that appears to be a later duplicate I will make arrangements to have that memorial merged or deleted.

For all other circumstances, please only send me additions, i.e., missing memorial numbers missing birth or death years, change in photo status (marker photo posted) or marker not present. It really speeds things up for me if I can get all the additions listed together and make those changes as a bulk update from the spreadsheet.

That being said, if you are doing a lot of work in a section you are going to come up with things that need to be changed, not just added. In most cases these will be discrepancies in the names or dates. It's fine to batch those if you want to but send them to me either in a separate tab in the spreadsheet you are working with, or send them to me as an entirely separate spreadsheet.

Where to send updates

By the way, these spreadsheets can be emailed to glendaledb@mills-sfv.com. They can also go to my other main email addresses but they should not be sent to the tropico email address as that is reserved for Find A Grave updates at this time.

Burials that are not listed

There is one more thing that you are likely to run into so I will address it as well. You either find a memorial for someone who is not listed on my pages or you create a memorial for someone who is not listed. There are two scenarios where this will happen which are common, one is the newest burials in the cemetery. My database was assembled between October 2011 and March of 2012 so a number of people who died during that time period do not show up in the database, and most of the burials for people that died since then do not show up in the database. The second scenario where this is quite likely is in some of the older sections of the cemetery, in many cases you will find people whose names are not listed on the Forest Lawn website at all.

This is why if you are doing a lot of work in a section that is poorly documented or one of the older sections it makes sense, if you can, to take your pictures by rows and have a map of that section you can work with if one is available. Even if there are the little round lot markers near a grave, it is frequently difficult to align those precisely with the actual burial plots, and it's a good idea to be able to line your photos up against a burial with a good known plot location. I am pathologically compulsive about this myself and also do things like taking shots as I come to empty spaces so that I can determine the proper order and numbering of burials if I find people who are not listed on the Forest Lawn website. (This is of course also good for documenting the no markers as you will come to spots where there is supposed to be someone buried but you can see there is no marker).

In any event, if you find burials that are not listed on the section pages, if they are more recent deaths you can usually find them on the Forest Lawn website and verify you have the correct plot location. If the plot location is listed on the Find A Grave memorial, you can send me that Find A Grave memorial number and just let me know it is unlisted on my section pages. If you have a bunch of these you can put them in a spreadsheet, but like I said earlier, please split these into a separate tab on the spreadsheet so I know what they are and don't get them mixed up with any of the other updates.

What do you do if someone else has put in the memorial and they don't have the plot information listed? Go ahead and send me that memorial number (or numbers) as well, but make a note the plot information is missing on the memorial. If you send me the plot information I will send an edit myself to the person who maintains the memorial, or you can do that yourself. Either way works, but I won't attempt to import those entries into the database until the plot information is completely listed on the memorial itself.

Other help and supported formats

By the way, if anyone needs pointers on working with these spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel, I am available to remotely "jump into" your computer and give tutorials if you need a hand.

If you don't have Microsoft Excel available on your computer but have some other spreadsheet program, you should send your files to me as a tab delimited text file if you have that option, or export it as an excel file if your software supports that.

Do you have to send me the data in the order I have it presented on the pages, with all the same columns? Absolutely not! You can send me the columns in any order you want to, which works for you. However, that being said, if you settle on a particular order, stick with it and don't start changing the columns around every week. Consistency is the grease that makes this part of the project work, and I do need consistency to make it work on my end.

BTW, the field (or column) I have to have submitted with every entry is the people ID (for people who are already in the database, I have discussed above dealing with those who aren't). I like having the names listed as well so that I can verify the IDs match up with the right people. Other than that, all I need is the information that is missing, memorial numbers, birth or death years, photo status, etc.

Anomalies and discrepancies

By the way, there are three more scenarios I should outline and what should be done in each case. One of the three is where you pull up a memorial in Find A Grave that I have provided a link to and it appears to be the wrong person, the name matches but the section of the cemetery I have them listed in appears to be a completely different section, or there are some other things about the memorial that make you think I just have the wrong person. Just email me a note that I seem to have the wrong memorial linked to that person.

Another scenario is where the name and the section matches but the dates don't match, like, not even close. In some cases I have matched up a name and a death date with the wrong person from the death indexes and in that case just let me know the memorial seems to be for the wrong person. In some cases I have just done wild-ass guesses because there were no dates for the person at all on the Forest Lawn website, so in at least a few cases I have been making an educated guess and just been completely wrong. In cases like that I will edit the memorial and change the information to correct it.

A third scenario is when you click on a find a grave memorial link and it either goes to a page telling you the memorial cannot be found, or that the memorial has been merged into another memorial and you have to click another link to go to the surviving memorial. These are signs that the memorial I had linked to was a duplicate, and has either been deleted or has been merged into a memorial that (typically) was created earlier. Please let me know about these if you find them, as well. I will update the memorial number in the database so the next time the page is republished with that listing the glitch will disappear.

Updating sections on website

As I accumulate updates for people in the different sections, I publish those sections again so the listings on my website are periodically updated. Please be patient if you don't see the updates you submitted appear for a while. I can sometimes have updates for several thousand names accumulated before I start catching up on the website, and when I do that I try and publish the sections first with the most numbers of updated names. In practice that means that sometimes I have sections where just a few people have been updated and it may take me many months to finally get around to "refreshing" those sections.

As the information on these pages becomes more accurate and up to date, my hope is that it will help people in their work to document the cemetery and those buried within it. I know it is extra work to not just create and update the Find A Grave memorials but also to send that information to us, and I can tell you that it may not be of any help to you when you do that, but it helps other people, and hopefully some of the work they have done will help you one day. These section pages have been indexed by Google now (and some of the other search sites like Bing, at least to some extent) so I am getting indications that other people are stumbling upon them from time to time and asking questions or sending updates about some of the people who are listed. The funniest thing that has happened lately was hearing from someone who had purchased some niches or crypts in one of the Forest Lawn sections that the people I had listed as being in that area were no longer there. He was right, so I updated the database and the page for that section. That was interesting, if completely surprising to me!

I want to take this time to thank the many people who have helped in this project and in many cases really moved it forward, even when my own resolve and dedication were in danger of flagging. This work we have collaborated on has been useful to many people, but I hope it is only a foundation for greater things to come. In any event, I'm quite proud to have been a part of it.

What's New

11 Oct 2014 Solved a thorny problem this weekend and have started rolling out updates with the fix. I had wanted to publish the full birth and death dates on the section listings (when available) but had been stymied by the fact that Microsoft Excel likes to mangle text data when it decides it knows better than the users what format their data should be in. I can't use the dates in Excel format because when they are converted into the HTML table data within the pages the dates are translated into the underlying number which excel uses to represent the dates. I finally figured out a workaround today and have started publishing the pages with full dates now. Don't hold your breath on it, I expect it will take months to get everything republished with full dates.

I had been wanting to do this for two reasons. One, the Forest Lawn website stopped showing full dates when they revamped it a year and a half ago, and on some of the common names it is virtually impossible to actually figure out who someone was unless you have some exact birth and death dates. Secondly, a lot of the Find A Grave memorials only have years because that was all that was listed on the marker, and it would be nice to have another resource for people to find that information. I don't have time to go around trying to get everyone to update their memorials, so this is a neat fix, at least as far as I am concerned.

This is no guarantee that the dates I have are accurate, by the way, but in general they are more accurate than the markers, except for the problem I've had with the 1900/1901 California Death Index bug. Some of the years I have are not accurate, for that matter, since they were estimated based on entries in the 1905-1939 California Death Index.

But in general the exact dates are correct, especially when I had an exact death date from the old Forest Lawn website and it corresponded with another exact death date from the California Death Index. So I feel quite confident about those dates. Some of the birth dates are a hash, though. I've found cases where the California Death Index was 30 years off on someone's birth year. On the other hand, I've seen markers where the birth year was 18 years off, as well. So use at your own risk, verify everything you can and research and source everything if you are trying to preserve your heritage.

In any event, I expect I will get updates from people on the dates, as we also get them on the memorials.

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