Find a Grave is a website that allows the public to search and add to an 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." Volunteers 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.[1]
History
1995–2009
The logo of Find a Grave used from 1995 to 2018[2]
Find a Grave was created in 1995 by Salt Lake City, Utah, resident Jim Tipton to support his hobby of visiting the burial sites of famous celebrities.[3] Tipton classified his early childhood as being a nerdy kid who had somewhat of a fascination with graves and some love for learning HTML.[4] He later added an online forum.[5] Find a Grave was launched as a commercial entity in 1998, first as a trade name[6] and then incorporated in 2000.[7][8]
2010–present
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.[9][10]
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."[11]
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,[12] 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 in 2018 the following year.[2]
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.[13]
Interment listings are added by individuals,[14]genealogical societies,[15] cemetery associations, and other institutions such as the International Wargraves Photography Project.[16]
Contributors must register as members to submit listings, called memorials, on the site. The submitter becomes the manager of the listing, but may transfer management. Only the current manager of a listing may edit it, although any member may use the site's features to send correction requests to the listing's manager. Managers may add links to memorials of deceased spouses and parents for genealogical purposes. Deceased children's memorials that are linked to their parents' memorials will appear on the parents' memorials as their children. They will also appear as siblings of other deceased children whose memorials have been linked to the same parents.[17] Links to external websites and email addresses are not allowed.[18]
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.[19]
Find a Grave also maintains lists of memorials of famous persons by their "claim to fame", such as Medal of Honor recipients,[24] religious figures,[25] and educators.[26] Find a Grave exercises editorial control over these listings.[27]
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[28] differs from that used in many countries, including the United States.
Policies
Website policy is to remove memorials or transfer their management at the request of an immediate family member.[29] In January 2022, following complaints, Find a Grave announced a new policy for memorials of recently deceased persons.[30] Under the new policy, any photos or personal information, including obituaries, are hidden for three months.[31][32]
^Moody, Sharon Tate (January 24, 2010). "Find A Grave can shorten the search". The Tampa Tribune. Tampa Media Group. Archived from the original on January 13, 2012. Retrieved December 28, 2011. The entries with tombstone photographs obviously are reliable, but if the entry is based only on a paper record of the interment (without a photograph), it's easy to mistype the date, so you're bound to find errors.
^Dickerson, Melissa (2016). 10 Tips for Searching the Find a Grave website for your family history & genealogy. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN978-1534710405. OCLC967966290.
^Pierre-Louis, Marian (July 11, 2015). "4 Ways to Research in a Cemetery". Legacy News Family Tree. Archived from the original on April 15, 2021. Retrieved November 22, 2020.
