Mt. Hope Cemetery Plans to Resell Unclaimed Plots

The owners of more than 2,000 unclaimed grave sites in Mt. Hope Cemetery in Southeast San Diego must act soon or their plots will be resold by the cemetery.

The city is running a series of newspaper advertisements to locate owners of grave plots who have had no contact with the cemetery for at least 60 years, said Rhea Kuhlman, assistant city property director. The final ad will run Monday.

The ads list the last known owners of the grave sites and announce a July 18 Superior Court date to have the plots declared abandoned.

Officials expect few plots to be claimed.

San Diego’s only city-owned cemetery opened in 1869, when plots sold for about $40, and some of the unclaimed sites date back that far, Kuhlman said. “Someone that got a grave in 1869 isn’t likely to be claiming it,” she said. “Some of them were bought in big lots, and then their relatives moved out of town . . . just like people sometimes forget that they have bank accounts.”

So far only five or six people have come forward to claim plots on the list, said Sandra Ward, acting cemetery manager. All of them were aware that they owned the plots, but had not contacted the cemetery until the list came out.

In addition to a few calls to confirm ownership, the cemetery has received a flood of calls from people who are confused about what is going on, Ward said. Many were concerned that the cemetery planned to “reclaim” graves--a practice in Europe and in some parts of the Eastern United States in which plots are leveled and dirt is added so new graves can be dug over the old ones, Ward said.

Grave reclaiming is not allowed in California, she said.

Although the cemetery is about $40,000 a year short of its goal of being self-sufficient, money is not the primary motive for the decision to sell unclaimed graves, Kuhlman said.

“The main motivation is to provide grave sites in attractive areas where the public has requested them, and we don’t have available sites,” she said.

Grave sites that go unclaimed, which would have sold for as little as $2 each at the beginning of the Depression in 1929, will be sold at current market values ranging from $395 to $795, Kuhlman said.