Calvary Cemetery, San Diego, CA

Calvary Cemetery, San Diego, CA

This web site is a comprehensive study and presentation of existing information about the historic Calvary Cemetery (now a part of Calvary Pioneer Memorial Park) at 1501 Washington Place in San Diego, California. It is devoted to honoring and preserving the memory of the people who are buried there.

Calvary Cemetery (part of what is now Calvary Pioneer Memorial Park, commonly just called Pioneer Park) in the Mission Hills community of San Diego, California was a Catholic cemetery primarily in use between 1875 and 1919. Burials continued until 1960 however. In 1970 the cemetery was converted to a public park and the grave markers (but not the people) were removed. A group of some of the gravestones were clustered together and a central memorial was placed in the southeast corner of the park. Subsequently, the removed and discarded gravestones were buried on the grounds of San Diego's Mount Hope Cemetery. This action destroyed these historic monuments and the only existing record of hundreds of people who were born and died before birth and death certificates became standard.

The exact number of people buried at Calvary Cemetery is not known. Complete records no longer exist in one place. However, the exhaustive research for this web site has documented almost 4,000 burials. More than 1,500 of the burials occurred before July 1, 1905 when California established specific statewide requirements for registration of deaths.