07 November 2008

Glen Abbey Memorial Park and Mortuary

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Glen Abbey Memorial Park and Mortuary is one of the largest cemeteries in South San Diego County. It is located at 3838 Bonita Road in Bonita, CA 91902 (phone (619) 498-4600 and (877) 442-2551) an unincorporated area just east of downtown Chula Vista. The Glen Abbey Memorial Park and Mortuary web site is http://www.glenabbeysandiego.net/index.html.

The entrance to the cemetery appears like this from Bonita Road (looking south):




The beautiful Little Chapel of the Roses, a non-sectarian chapel and an exact replica of the Lord Tennyson Chapel in Somersby, England, which is a true landmark, often hosts memorial services, funerals, weddings and quinceaneros.

The map below shows the physical location of the Memorial Park. It is about one mile east of Interstate 805 on the south side of Bonita Road.

The section map of the memorial park is shown below (Bonita Road is at the left of the map - the numbers are Block numbers):

Glen Abbey Mortuary and Memorial Park is a quiet, lovely and spacious site of about 120 acres. Because Glen Abbey is a memorial park, all markers are flush to the ground, and there are no tombstones or elaborate memorials. There are several columbariums, a veterans’ section, a babies section, and a nature garden where there are some inurnments and many scatterings.

Glen Abbey first opened in 1924 to accept remains of persons buried in a certain area of Evergreen Cemetery in La Mesa, east of San Diego, which was being sold for real estate development. Later, more were brought in to be re-interred from a cemetery in the Otay area of South San Diego, where a street was being widened. There are now over 35,000 persons buried or inurned there.

A comprehensive survey of the "guests" buried or inurned at Glen Abbey was made by the Chula Vista Genealogical Society was published on CD-ROM in 2006. For availability of this CD-ROM, please see here. The survey list includes last name, first name, plot location (lot-section-block), date of birth, date of death, remarks, and veteran status. CVGS will do limited lookups in the cemetery list, and take photographs of cemetery plots - see here. The Chula Vista Public Library has a two-volume paper copy of the cemetery listings on the Family Research shelves in the Civic Center Branch Library.

The Find a Grave web site has links to listings of 553 "guests" at Glen Abbey Memorial Park.

The USGenWeb Archives Cemetery Project has lists of transcribed cemetery gravestones here and here.

1 comment:

Diane Wright said...

I love you blog! I, too, am a native of San Diego, living about 80 miles away in Corona. My family is buried at Holy Cross, maybe you can work on that cemetery someday! I have not been to any other cemeteries in SD (shame on me)but I have been to many across the county.