Grave Hunting Is More Than a Hobby

It’s not everyday that you run into someone who likes to visit the dead. But tell that to George Bacon, who is the assistant director of both the here and the San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio in San Francisco.

When he was just 13, Bacon developed an interest in dead people and in finding out where they were buried—and spent a lot time visiting their graves. But the dead he favored weren’t just ordinary people. Rather, they were deceased gunslingers, lawmen and outlaws of the Old West.

As Bacon grew older, his interest broadened to include finding the final resting places of veterans and his own relatives, whom he traces back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

A Vietnam veteran once active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Bacon, 63, has been a park ranger, a border patrol agent and a criminal investigator. Throughout the years, he has maintained a keen interest in tracking down graves and is active in a popular Internet grave-hunting site called Find a Grave.

The father of three, Bacon lives with his wife on the grounds of the 161-acre Golden Gate National Cemetery. From the windows of his home, he can see the final resting place of thousands of service men and women.

Recently, San Bruno Patch talked to Bacon about his interest in grave hunting and his current job.

San Bruno Patch: What sparked your interest in grave hunting?

George Bacon: As a kid growing up in the ‘50s, I was immersed in TV westerns, shows about Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Wild Bill Hickok, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

That led me to wanting to know more about the lives of these characters, so I started reading their biographies.

At 13, I was in the midst of reading a book about the gunslinger “Doc” Holliday when I realized that Holliday was buried not far from my home in Colorado Springs.

I prevailed on my dad to drive up to visit Holliday’s grave. The headstone is engraved with a pair of crossed six shooters and a deck of cards and, as I remember, the wording is very colorful.

Anyway, that experience got me hooked on finding graves. Later I visited the grave sites of many of the other people who were portrayed on the shows I was watching.

Patch: Why was it so important to see the actual graves?

Bacon: It’s important to me is to have some tangible link to the past. Oftentimes a headstone is that tangible link.

Patch: How did you get interested in finding the veterans’ graves?

Bacon: I was a marine during the Vietnam War and did two tours in Vietnam, and my father was a career soldier, so my interest in vets was an outcome of that.

When I was living in Colorado and working as a marshall in a small town,  I found out about Find a Grave, a website containing the names of millions of people, both famous and not, and decided to enter all the names of the service men and women in a nearby cemetery.

Patch: You were still a Marine when you became active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. How did that come about and how did it sit with your military family?

Bacon: Growing up in a military family, I didn’t question the war, but after my first tour of duty, I slowly became educated about what was going on and got caught up in the anti-war movement. It was embarrassing to my father to have a Marine son protesting against the war and I was persona non grata for a while. But we reconciled later.

Patch: How did your career at national cemeteries come about?

Bacon: After the Marines, I spent most of my career in law enforcement and when I retired in 2001, I decided I was too young to stop working. But I didn’t want to go back to law enforcement. At the time, the Veterans Administration was hiring management trainees for national cemeteries and I decided to apply. It was about as different a job as I could find.

After the training, I became the director of the Fort McPherson National Cemetery in western Nebraska. From there I was selected for the job I have now.

Patch: What’s the most challenging part of your job?

Bacon: The main thing is that we don’t have room for any more burials, so we are continually turning people away. The closest national cemetery is the Sacramento National Cemetery in Dixon.

Another challenge is controlling the gopher and mole population. I did a stint as a border patrol agent and for me it’s like that job in that you’re always fighting a losing battle.

Patch: What do you like best about your job?

Bacon: I feel honored to do this kind of work and to serve other veterans and their families in time of need.

Patch: How would someone go about searching for a grave site?

Bacon: If the deceased person served in the military, I’d send them to nationwide grave site locator on the Veterans Administration’s website. The records go back about 10 years. If the person were not a veteran, I’d send them to the Find a Grave site. It contains millions of searchable records and is growing everyday.

Patch: Are there any famous people at the Golden Gate National Cemetery?

Bacon: The World War II naval hero Chester Nimitz is here, along with 15 Medal of Honor winners. Interestingly, the lawman Wyatt Earp is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Colma.

Patch: How active are you in grave hunting now?

Bacon: I don’t do as much as I used to. Sometimes I track down graves when people call asking for a photo of their family’s headstone, and I still enter the names of veterans into the Find a Grave site. Over the years I’ve visited thousands of grave sites and entered almost 900 names into Find a Grave.

Today, I’m focused on researching my own family’s history. My ancestors go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and were some of the first pilgrims to arrive on our shores. They crossed the country with the Western expansion, and I’ve found ancestors buried in Pennsylvania and Illinois.

For me, the only way you have any physical contact with your ancestors is to visit their graves and touch their headstones. You feel like, "This is where I came from; this is part of my history."