Find a Grave is a collaborative online database of human and pet cemetery records. It is owned by Ancestry.com. Its stated mission is "to help people from all over the world work together to find, record and present final disposition information as a virtual cemetery experience." Users can create memorials, upload photos of grave markers or deceased persons, transcribe photos of headstones, and more. As of 2024[update], the site claimed more than 250 million memorials.

History

Early history

The logo of Find a Grave used from 1995 to 2018

Find a Grave was created in 1995 by Jim Tipton of Salt Lake City, Utah, to support his hobby of visiting the burial sites of famous celebrities. Tipton described his early childhood as a nerdy kid with a fascination for graves, and an interest in HTML. He later added an online forum. Find a Grave was launched as a commercial entity in 1998, first as a trade name and then incorporated in 2000.

In 2010, Find a Grave expanded to include graves of non-celebrities in order to allow online visitors to pay respect to their deceased relatives or friends.

As part of Ancestry.com

In 2013, Tipton sold Find a Grave to Ancestry.com, stating the genealogy company had "been linking and driving traffic to the site for several years. Burial information is a wonderful source for people researching their family history." According to a press release, Ancestry.com officials said they would "launch a new mobile app, improve customer support, [and] introduce an enhanced edit system for submitting updates to memorials, foreign-language support, and other site improvements."

In 2017, a beta website for a redesigned Find a Grave was launched at gravestage.com. From May 29 to July 10 of that year, the beta website was migrated to new.findagrave.com, and a new front end for it was deployed at beta.findagrave.com. The new site became live at the end of the year, and the old site was deprecated and officially retired the following year.

Content and features

The website contains listings of cemeteries and graves from around the world. American cemeteries are organized by state and county, and many cemetery records contain Google Maps (with GPS coordinates supplied by contributors) and photographs of the cemeteries and gravesites. Individual grave records may contain dates and places of birth and death, biographical information, cemetery and plot information, photographs (of the grave marker, the individual, etc.), and contributor information.

Interment listings are added by individuals, genealogical societies, cemetery associations, and other institutions such as the International Wargraves Photography Project.

Contributors must register as members to submit listings, called memorials, on the site. The submitter becomes the manager of the memorial, but may transfer management to another member. Management may also be transferred if a manager’s account meets certain criteria for inactivity. Only the current manager of a memorial may edit it directly, but there is a process for other members’ edits to be accepted and incorporated. Managers may add links to memorials of deceased spouses and parents for genealogical purposes. According to these links, links to memorials will automatically appear on the appropriate pages as children and siblings.

Any member may also add photographs and notations to individual listings; notations may include images of flowers, flags, religious, or other symbols, and often include a message of sympathy or condolence. Members may post requests for photos of a specific grave; these requests will be automatically sent to other members who have registered their location as being near that grave.

The website is often recommended as a resource for genealogy research.

Find a Grave also maintains lists of memorials of famous persons by their "claim to fame", such as Medal of Honor recipients, religious figures, and educators. Find a Grave exercises editorial control over these listings.

Starting on May 18, 2023, memorials may also be marked with a "Veteran" tag, but the definition of the term Veteran used by Find A Grave differs from that used in many countries, including the United States[citation needed].

Policies

Website policy is to remove memorials or transfer their management at the request of an immediate family member. In January 2022, following complaints, Find a Grave announced a new policy for memorials of recently deceased persons. Under the new policy, any photos or personal information, including obituaries, are hidden for three months.

See also

Citations

Sources

External links

  • Find a Grave memorial ID (P535) (see uses)
  • (in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedish)