A Cemetery With a Paper Trail

Forest Hill Cemetery was incorporated in April 1870. Its own record trail begins with burial lots on May 19, 1870. Single grave entries followed on May 26, 1872.

The books recorded names, ages or birth dates, places of birth, causes of death, sex, and notes. They also kept material from burial permits and undertaker certificates. When entries conflicted, gravestone inscriptions sometimes helped settle the record.

Transfers in the Records

The surviving Forest Hill transcription runs through December 1931 and repeatedly points outside the cemetery gates. It records bodies moved between Forest Hill and Dunmore Cemetery, Hyde Park Cemetery, Hyde Park Catholic Cemetery, Pine Brook Cemetery, Pittston Avenue Cemetery, Washington Avenue Cemetery, and other local burial grounds.

The transfer notes preserve details that a headstone alone cannot: original burial grounds, names recovered for older graves, dates of removal, and new lot numbers. They connect Forest Hill to the network of cemeteries that served Scranton and Dunmore.

Scranton in the Burial Books

About 18,000 people are buried at Forest Hill. Notable burials include Joseph A. Scranton, Congressmen William Connell and Charles R. Connell, and former Scranton mayor Robert H. McKune.

The burial books also include hundreds of Civil War veterans, Vietnam War veterans, miners, immigrants, African American and white families, coal operators, and people whose connection to Scranton survives mostly in cemetery records.

Norma Reese and the Maps

Norma Reese kept another kind of record in use: maps. She provided the Forest Hill maps that Lackawanna County PAGenWeb scanned in 2007 and reported that the old roads and lot numbers had not changed.

In 2021, Reese, Forest Hill’s caretaker and archivist, hosted a Jane Jacobs Walk at the cemetery. The walk began at 1830 Jefferson Avenue and used Forest Hill as a way to read Scranton through the people buried just over the city line in Dunmore.

For families and researchers, the useful Forest Hill details are often small: a lot number, an old road, a transfer note, an undertaker certificate. Together they make the cemetery one of the places where Scranton’s family history can still be followed on the ground.