History of the Weimar Joint Sanatorium and the Weimar Cemetery

The Weimar Joint Sanatorium opened to receive indigent tuberculosis patients on November 17, 1919. Located five miles south of Colfax in Placer County, California, the Sanatorium operated for sixty years, accepting applicants from 15 California counties. While some recovered, many residents died and about a third of them were buried in the adjoining Weimar Cemetery, their graves marked only by a wooden stake with a brass number disc. In 2012 a massive research effort, known as the Weimar Project, began. The purpose was to match numbers with names for the people buried in the Weimar Cemetery so that the veterans buried there could be honored and so that relatives could locate lost family members. To accomplish the goals of the Weimar Project, every death certificate in Placer County, for the years the Weimar Cemetery was in operation, was examined and that data reconciled with what original Weimar Sanatorium records still exist. This book provides a history of the Weimar Joint Sanatorium and the Weimar Cemetery, photos of the Sanatorium, and a list of names and grave numbers of the approximately 1,450 people who are buried there. Also included are links to individual electronic memorials on the Find a Grave web site. As a direct result of this work, over a dozen families have been able to reconnect with long-lost loved ones. Also, several of the veterans have received headstones from the Veterans Administration and the others now have permanent markers as a result of a private donation. These are the reasons this work is so satisfying to the people involved in this project. We hope you enjoy the journey in reading of this project and learning of those that lived there.