A Tribute to Their Elders

A Roman Catholic priest will don Father Junipero Serra’s 230-year-old vestments today to offer a service for the dead.

Starting at the tiny chapel named after the Spanish padre who founded California’s missions, Father Arthur Holquin will lead a nearly two-mile procession from California’s first church up Ortega Highway to Old Mission San Juan Capistrano Cemetery. There the group will celebrate the first Mass at the historic graveyard in more than 40 years.

“It will be an emotional experience for everyone,” said Jerry Nieblas, the mission’s artifacts coordinator who helped plan the event. “This is the start of Orange County. Many generations of my family are buried on this hill.”

Most of San Juan Capistrano’s founders are interred in ground that has been sanctified by the church and is considered sacred by Native Americans. In relating the saga of the little-known 1.65-acre cemetery, Nieblas, 54, likes to recall the oral history passed down by his grandmother, a Juaneno Indian buried here.

“She used to tell me that there were already people being buried here in the early 1800s,” he said.

Back then, he said, you could see two rivers, the ocean, the mission and the town from atop the hill. So it was only natural that, when the missionaries ran out of space at their original cemetery next to the chapel, they began burying people here.

In 1878, the man who owned and was buried on the ranch, James Sheehan, sold the land to the Catholic Church. The Diocese of Orange still maintains it for the parishioners of Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Many of the parishioners are descended from the area’s first inhabitants, including Native Americans, European immigrants such as Basques, French and Irish. With the earliest marked graves dating from the mid-1800s, Nieblas estimated that several hundred people were buried at the cemetery with tombstones bearing such historic San Juan monikers as Ramos, Rios, Lobos, Forster and Yorba, for whom Yorba Linda was named.

To be buried here today, he said, one must be a descendant of someone interred at the cemetery, a restriction that holds the number of funerals down to a handful each year.

Because space is at a premium, Nieblas said, cremations and double interments are common. “We can be cremated and go right on top of our ancestors,” he said.

“That’s what I want -- to be cremated and go right on top of my grandmother.”

Recently Centra Realty Corp., an Irvine-based real estate developer, spent $150,000 to build a wall around the cemetery, which had been enclosed by a rickety chain-link fence. The company is developing a 10-acre business park adjacent to the site.

That, plus the fact that locals have been talking for years about holding a service to honor their dead, prompted today’s event. “We hope to make it an annual thing,” Nieblas said.

He said the last Mass at the cemetery was celebrated in the 1960s to honor war dead. Most Catholic cemeteries hold annual events to honor the dead.

“The people buried here are very special to us,” Nieblas said, “and their history is important. It’s good that we’re honoring our ancestors -- this is our toast to them.”