In response to the early 1930s closure and clearing of San Francisco's Masonic Cemetery, where Emperor Norton had been buried in 1880, a group of business and civic leaders who were members of the Pacific–Union Club came together in early 1934 and formed the Emperor Norton Memorial Association for the purpose of securing a new grave site and headstone for the Emperor. 

Following the Emperor's April 1934 reburial in a plot the Association had purchased in Woodlawn Cemetery, Colma, Calif., the Association held a public dedication ceremony at the grave site on Saturday 30 June 1934. 

It appears that, with a couple of exceptions, all of the newspaper coverage of this event that included photography featured one — very occasionally both — of two specific uncredited photos.  

This week, we discovered that the photographs were taken by San Francisco Examiner staff photographer George Elmer Sheldon and that Sheldon actually took 6 photographs that day — including 4 photos that apparently were never published.

All 6 photographs were part of a 2006 donation of some 5 million photos from the San Francisco Examiner's photo morgue, c.1930–2000, to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. 

As of February 2024, only about 22,000 of these photographs had been digitized and made available via the Berkeley Library Digital Collections website. 

Happily, George Sheldon's 6 photographs of the June 1934 dedication ceremony for Emperor Norton’s reburial and headstone are among these. 

According to Berkeley Library's viewing statistics for its Digital Collections page for this group of photographs, the photos have been viewed via the page only a handful of times since October 2021 — which presumably corresponds to when the photos went live on the page.

We present all 6 photographs here. We believe this is the first time the four unpublished photos of the ceremony — including a lovely capture of Golden Gate Park superintendent John McLaren helping to unveil the Emperor's new headstone — have been published outside the Berkeley database.