Dora and Georgia Dunlap

My great grandfather Joe Dunlap was the only boy amongst six sisters (save for an older brother who died as an infant). Most of the Dunlap extended family was born in Denison Illinois and died there, or in Terre Haute. However, there is a notable exception: two older sisters moved to California and are buried there.

Oldest sister Dora, and Georgia (twin of Roberta) both lived are are both buried in San Bernardino CA.

The 1910 census record places both of them in the area, Dora being 29 and Georgia being 26. It is unclear why they moved so far away from their families.

A recent family trip to Palm Springs in October 2022 put us in the area of their burial, so we decided to try and stop by and see their grave. Based on findagrave records, we knew they were buried at the mausoleum at the Montecito Memorial park in San Bernardino.

We stopped by the cemetary, and found the mausoleum, but it didn’t match the findagrave picture. Upon going into the office, we were told we actually needed to find the “old” building, so we had to drive over to a different area of the park.

Let’s just say that the old mausoleum is…long forgotten about. It’s in a far remote corner of the park, and looks to be primarily used as an accessory structure for storing gardening equipment.

We walked up the steps, and the door was locked. A quick call to the front desk led to a nice groundskeeper coming over with keys to let us in. However, we quickly all realized that the reason the door was locked was someone had broken off a key inside of the lock. We were not able to get into the building, unfortunately.

A picture of the kids on the outside was as good as we could get.