Glen Park writer Beth Winegarner presents her new book on the buried history of San Francisco’s long gone cemeteries…
with a little help from “Here Lies a Story”‘s Courtney Minick.

San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History, pub date Aug. 28 (call Bird & Beckett to order your copy now!), traces the international city’s settler graveyards — and uncovers how more than 50,000 graves were left behind when the dead moved to Colma. 

Photo: You’re looking at Sen. David Broderick’s monument (the pointy one in the far distance) in Laurel Hill Cemetery, near where the Trader Joe’s on Masonic Avenue  is today. In the foreground is Calvary Cemetery, on the slopes of Lone Mountain. Credit: Lawrence & Houseworth, publisher, Library of Congress.

San Francisco is famous for not having any cemeteries, but the claim isn’t exactly what it seems. In the early 20th Century, the city relocated more than 150,000 graves to the nearby town of Colma to make way for a rapidly growing population. But an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 burials were quietly built over and forgotten, only to resurface every time a new building project began. 

The dead still lie beneath some of the city’s most cherished destinations, including the Legion of Honor, United Nations Plaza, the Asian Art Museum and the University of San Francisco. Join author Beth Winegarner as she maps the city’s early burial grounds, from the 1760s to 1901, and tells the stories of the dead whose lives and deaths have been erased. 

Beth Winegarner is a journalist, author, essayist and pop culture critic who’s contributed to the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Wired, Mother Jones, and many others. She is a former daily news reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and a former contributor to The San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of several books, including “Sacred Sonoma,” “The Columbine Effect: How Five Teen Pastimes Got Caught in the Crossfire and Why Teens are Taking Them Back,” and “Tenacity: Heavy Metal in the Middle East and Africa.” She lives in San Francisco, grew up in Northern California, and is a member of the Writers Grotto and The Ruby, both based in San Francisco.