INVESTIGATION
Searching for a loved one's grave at an abandoned Maryland cemetery
A searchable map shows what the burial records say about where each person rests, and how certain that is.
CLINTON, Md. From the road, Forest Hills Memorial Gardens looks like an overgrown park. Up close, headstones sit hidden in tall grass, and some markers have sunk into the ground or broken.
For families with relatives buried here, a visit can turn into a search. People have walked the grounds looking for a parent's or a grandparent's grave and left without finding it.
Part of the problem is paper. Neither the state nor the county holds a burial map for the cemetery, and Maryland law does not require one to be filed.
The map below is built to close that gap. Type a name to see the plot or section the records give for that person, and how sure the records are.
Search the burial records
How to use the map
- Search a first or last name, or browse the A to Z list.
- Open a record to see the years, the plot or section, and who else is recorded in the same plot.
- Where the records give only a section, the whole section is highlighted. Where they give no location, the card says so.
- On a phone, tap the location button to see where you are standing. Inside this article, use two fingers to move the map.
The map shows what the records say. It is a guide for finding a resting place, not a surveyed plan of the grounds.
For the newsroom: the embed code
This page and the map are two separate sites. The one line below is all that puts the map into this article. Paste it into the article editor's HTML or code embed block, unchanged.
<iframe src="https://fh-grave-finder-preview.pages.dev/" title="Forest Hills Memorial Gardens grave finder" width="100%" height="700" loading="lazy" allow="geolocation; clipboard-write; web-share" style="width:100%;height:700px;border:0"></iframe>