Some notes on the evolution of the Forest Lawn Project and what it has now morphed into, 2011-2021
By Chris Mills
I first started scraping the Forest Lawn memorial parks website in November 2011. The people entries that were first imported into the database I used have a creation date of 23 November 2011. The scraping project went on at full speed for just over two months, with the automated part ending on 26 January 2012. At that point I had scraped 651,531 discrete people records (although some of those later turned out to be duplicates, but that wasn't my fault - they were duplicated on the Forest Lawn website). Those records were scraped over the course of 64 days, which means I was averaging 10,180 records a day. The only reason I could do so many was that I was using tools like Wget to grab the web pages and FileMonkey to process the pages as I pulled them in.
This was the last person whose record I grabbed automatically with my web scraping tools, Hazel Clytee Luker Zyskowski, people id 651531
This was the first person I scraped after that, on the following day: Ernesto Dela Vega Dar Juan, people id 651532. I don't even remember now how I found these people were on the Forest Lawn website but I had missed them with my automatic system because new people were being added to the website every day.
Over the next day I found another 20 or so people like that, before I finished off that stage of the project and stopped looking for new records. This was the last person from that stage: Ethel Mae Roche, people id 651555
I ended up doing a lot more work over the next month before I started dumping records onto Find A Grave on 22 February 2012. I was running queries against a California Death Index database and a database with part of the social security Death Master File records, although that database was woefully out of date before I started using it, so it wasn't nearly as much help as I'd hoped it would be, although it did match up thousands of people, just not as many as I wanted.
While I was going through the find a grave memorials (trying to avoid duplicating existing memorials) on 21 February 2011 I found another new record which postdated my scraping project and went back to the Forest Lawn site and verified the information from the find a grave memorial, that was: Harold William Topham, people id 651556
I was then involved with find a grave quite extensively for the next several months, and didn't add another record to the database until over four months later, in late June of 2012. That was: Laurie Bryson Hann, people id 651557
Another interesting milestone was the first person I found from actually walking and working the cemetery who was NOT on the Forest Lawn website, and is still not there in 2021: A. Ray McDonald, people id 651559. I added Ray to find a grave and to the database on 8 July 2012. In the following nine years I have found hundreds of other people who are not listed on the Forest Lawn website, although some have eventually showed up at a later date after I found them, although many have not.
For a good chunk of the next three years, I was worried more about find a grave than the database. I still added records to the database but I was more worried about keeping find a grave up to date than the database, since I knew lots and lots of people were looking at stuff on find a grave and only a few people were looking at the parts of the database I was putting online independently of find a grave.
However I did add about 3800 more people records between July 2012 and the end of August 2015. I also started adding other cemeteries outside the Forest Lawn system as I expanded the scope of the project. I started doing this in 2013 but only added a few cemeteries between 2013 and 2015.
In August 2015 I had a major dustup with the find a grave administration when they started doing some completely irrational things to some of the contributors. This had always been a bit of a problem with them but they started going full retard at that point. I didn't completely end my involvement with find a grave then (how could I, without abandoning all my family memorials?) but I did scale way back on my involvement with the site. I went from creating thousands of memorials every year to somewhere between zero and ten memorials every year. Technically I was still a contributor on the site, but just barely.
At that point I still had tons of research I wanted to publish, but I was no longer interested in putting much of it on find a grave. So I started looking into other ways I could get the information online. I already knew how to code html, I had been doing that for the last five years. I started learning how to use the MySQL database system and started learning how to code pages using the PHP language.
It took me almost two years to get my new system up and online. In the interim I kept using my Microsoft Access database to store the information I was accumulating, although I knew that was just a temporary solution until I could get everything switched over to MySQL.
The last record I added to the database before I went online with the MySQL system and PHP pages was one of my sisters-in-law who had passed away, Jan Reed Mills, people id 660227. In the almost two years since I had my falling out with find a grave, in addition to learning the new software I was using and putting the new system online, I had added between 4800 and 4900 new records to the database.
Once the database was online I burned my boats, as it were, and stopped using the Microsoft Access database and started doing everything with the MySQL database. Over the last four years, in addition to tinkering with the database itself and the web interface with it (which I think has been greatly improved in that time, but I'm biased), I have added almost 36,000 new people records to the database and a ton of new cemeteries (the number of cemeteries are now closer to 2300 than 2200 at this point). Still nowhere near the volume of stuff find a grave has online, but at least most of my data is more accurate than most of their data, as far as I'm concerned.
I feel like I'm going to add more to this but don't know what to say right now. It's late and I'm tired, so I think I'm just going to wrap this up, upload the page to the web and let it go for the night.
For now I leave you with this quote from Upton Sinclair, who left us with this gem of wisdom:
"It's very hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
Page created 5 August 2021
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