Pioneer Cemetery (Morningside) Sylmar California
I feel compelled to create this page because there has been so much bad information and misinformation circulated over the years about this cemetery. Ann Stansell has done a tremendous amount of work over the last 15 years gathering information about the people buried in this cemetery and trying to correct the records, but there is a yawning gap between the roughly 800 people listed on the Find A Grave page for the cemetery and the 28 people listed on the official San Fernando Valley Historical Society page for the cemetery.
A brief bit of history is in order, I will attempt not to bore you. The cemetery was founded between 1874 and 1894, and is the second oldest cemetery in the San Fernando Valley, only newer than the original San Fernando Mission cemetery which dates from 1797. The earliest burial I can find in Morningside is from 1884.
Morningside (as it was called through most of its existence) had several changes of ownership before being bought by mortuary owner Will Noble in 1927 for a nominal sum. After his death in 1932 the cemetery lingered on for a few more years, but the last official burial took place in 1939.
Over the next 20 years, while technically being owned by Will's widow Nellie, the cemetery was essentially abandoned and became overgrown with weeds. In addition, anything of value was stolen from the grounds, and curiously enough, most of the grave markers were pilfered and removed from the cemetery grounds. The prevailing theory is that many were put in the trunks of cars and used as ballast to keep the rear tires on the ground when the owners were racing the cars, probably in what we would now call street racing.
An odd footnote from this period is the cemetery's role in the filming of the movie Plan 9 From Outer Space by director Ed Wood. Apparently he had his crew sneak onto the grounds and film there, my guess is that he thought there would be no need to obtain a film permit if he shot the scenes in an abandoned cemetery, and apparently he was right.
In 1958 the San Fernando Mission Parlor of the Native Daughters of the Golden West began efforts to restore the cemetery. In 1959 Nellie Noble formally signed over the cemetery title to the Native Daughters. On 6 December 1959 the title transfer was published and the cemetery was legally closed to new burials.
During this time under the tireless leadership of Carolyn Riggs, the Native Daughters undertook Herculean efforts to refurbish, clean up the cemetery grounds, and beautify what remained (or at least stop it from being a crime-ridden eyesore).
In 1961 the cemetery was declared State Historical Landmark 753. Unfortunately, even this designation and the tireless work of the Native Daughters could not fix the issues plaguing the ex-cemetery. Since there was no fence around the cemetery and the grounds had been a free for all for decades, for the next 18 years (until 1979) the cemetery grounds were plagued by vandalism, thievery and god only knows what else.
A proper fence was installed by a local builder in 1979 in exchange for permission for the builder to construct condominiums on the property adjoining the cemetery
In 1980 the Native Daughters turned over management of the cemetery grounds to the Sylmar Civic Association. Incremental improvements were made to the property with other nonprofit groups assisting, but the vandalism and criminal acts on the grounds continued, although not nearly as frequently as they had prior to the installation of the fence in 1979.
In 2002 the Native Daughters formally transferred the title of the cemetery to the San Fernando Valley Historical Society. Under the stewardship of the SFVHS more improvements were made, and in 2005 the cemetery was opened to the public for the first time in 66 years.
The same year Jacky Walker joined Joyce Gaynor as co-chair of the Pioneer Cemetery Committee. Under their leadership one of the initiatives which was pursued was getting a survey done of the cemetery grounds with Ground Penetrating Radar. This was done in 2011. The results were surprising to say the least. Carolyn Riggs of the Native Daughters had found a list of names compiled by the Noble Mortuary of their clients over the years. The list was around 700 names. The GPS results only showed 214 sets of verifiable adult remains, but it also turned out that the GPR had insufficient resolution to find any sets of remains smaller than 3 feet in length. As many of the burials in the cemetery over the years had been of stillborns, newborns, young infants and children under five years of age, the results of the GPR survey did nothing to answer the question of how many of those small children were still buried at the cemetery.
The "Carolyn Riggs" list of people who passed though the doors of the Noble Mortuary has resulted in much confusion over the years. The SFVHS published it on their website hoping that it would lead researchers and family members to help clear up who was actually buried at the Pioneer Cemetery. Unfortunately, well-meaning people on sites such as Find A Grave jumped in and took the entire list and added it to the Find A Grave entry for Pioneer Cemetery. This ended up being a self-reinforcing loop of misinformation, as people now started citing Find A Grave as being a source for the people being buried at Pioneer Cemetery, not realizing that this was all based on the Carolyn Riggs list, which included a number of people who were not in fact buried at Pioneer Cemetery.
After this happened the SFVHS pulled the Carolyn Riggs list off of their website and replaced it with the original list of 28 people who were known to be buried at Pioneer Cemetery. This is of course called bolting the barn door after the horses have fled. They actually apologize on their website for publishing the original list, but it resulted in making the entries on Find A Grave suspect to say the least.
Trying to rectify the problem, Jacky Walker was soliciting volunteers in 2012 to research the names on the list to try and figure out who was actually buried at the cemetery. I didn't have access to the death certificates at that time and had just started a massive project involving Forest Lawn, so I opted out. I don't know how Jacky and Ann Stansell got connected, but Ann Stansell took up the gauntlet and identified literally hundreds of people who had been buried at the cemetery, based on death certificates, burial permits, and who knows what other sources. As I was going through the find a grave listings over the last week, if I found something that Ann had posted which indicated someone was actually buried at Pioneer, I trusted her as a source. Conversely, if she put a note on a memorial that the person was buried elsewhere or moved elsewhere, I also took that as a virtual certainty.
When I started looking at Pioneer Cemetery on Find A Grave a few days ago, there were 805 names listed. I identified nine who were either duplicates or not in fact there, and have gotten three of them moved. I still have some pending edits out, so those are not resolved yet.
In addition to the people vouched for by Ann Stansell, I found a cemetery transcription from what I believe is the 1950s which had a few more names listed. I will probably put it online and put links to it here. I found it on Family Search Dot Org.
There are 112 names listed on Find A Grave which are not vouched for by Ann Stansell. I believe these are people who were on the Carolyn Riggs list but for whom there is either no documentation that they were actually buried at Pioneer, or there are death certificates out there or some other evidence which actually shows them having gone to other cemeteries or dispositions. I am going to reach out to Ann at some point and ask her what she knows about these names. With the automated edit system Find A Grave brought online in 2013, it is very likely we could clean up some of the entries on Find A Grave for Pioneer.
I am not sure why the SFVHS has never updated their list of 28 names and added some of the names Ann found. It is possible that with what happened with the Carolyn Riggs list they are "once bitten, twice shy". So they may be staying out of the burial listing business entirely at this point.
There is of course another problem which Ann Stansell has brought up. As the cemetery was falling into disrepair from the 1930s and 1940s on, it is a virtual certainty that some people disinterred the remains of their loved ones and moved them elsewhere. That's very tricky to track down when it happens, the paper trail to follow is not nearly as clear cut when someone is disinterred and reinterred.
It is unlikely that many if any of the poor Hispanic children who were buried there in the 1910s and 1920s were removed, but there were other people from prominent families whose families had the means and the money to move their bodies when the cemetery started going downhill. Lloyd Maclay, who was a grandson of the California state senator Charles Maclay, is one such person. There are undoubtedly quite a few others.
So what Ann Stansell has done is to show these people were in fact buried at Morningside/Pioneer, but it is no guarantee that their bodies are still there. That's a whole 'nother project, as they say, and possibly one that can never be definitively finished.
My next step is probably going to be going through the memorials I just hoovered into my database from Find A Grave. There appear to be a lot of typos and garbled names in that list, and I am going to have to spend a bit of time looking at the California Death Index and at death certificates to get it cleaned up. Hopefully I get it done while I'm still alive.
I have been out to the cemetery once or twice over the last 15 years and I have some photographs of it. I will dig those up and add some of them to this page to "liven" things up, as it were.
Sources and other pages on the cemetery:
Ann Stansell's virtual cemetery on Find A Grave (680 memorials listed as of April 2026)
My virtual cemetery on Find A Grave (683 memorials listed as of April 2026, still researching why I have three more total entries than Ann's V/C)
San Fernando Pioneer Memorial Cemetery AKA Morningside Cemetery on Genealogy Locator System (mills-sfv.com)
Who Lies Beneath Reconstructing the Burial Records of Pioneer Cemetery
(This is something posted by Ann Stansell on Academia Dot Edu. I believe you can view this in its entirety online but if you want to download the PDF version you will need to have an account on Academia Dot Edu. They do have free accounts which is what I used to log in)
California State Landmarks 0753 San Fernando Cemetery
What Lies Beneath the Many Mysteries of Pioneer Cemetery (PBS So Cal Dot Org)
Pioneer Cemetery San Fernado Valley Historical Society)
(Note: The List of Buried on this page at the bottom of the picture does not work, you have to go to the pulldown menu on Pioneer Cemetery and click the List of Buried from there. As discussed above, for some reason they have never added to the list of 28 names here to incorporate any of the additional people that Ann Stansell found the death certificates for)
San Fernando Pioneer Memorial Cemetery on Wikipedia