Where is My Ancestor Buried?

“Don’t underestimate the influence of the deceased in assisting your efforts.” – Quentin L. Cook

As you progress in your research and go further back within your family tree, it becomes more challenging to locate obituaries or other records which state where an individual was buried. Maybe you know the county where they died? Or the city that they lived in, but don’t know where to start when trying to find the burial location?

The home page of Find A Grave, where your are able to input a search for
a memorial

You can take this information that you know and turn to the online community known as Find A Grave (www.findagrave.com).

The Find A Grave website was founded by Jim Tipton in 1995, and launched commercially in 1998, as a way to document the burial sites of famous celebrities. Tipton later added an online forum. As the website grew, it began to include information for burial sites of non-celebrities to allow users to pay respects to their deceased loved ones virtually and to allow others to document the exact burial locations of their deceased relatives, friends, and ancestors.

In 2013, Tipton sold his website to Ancestry.com, as the website has developed into a large genealogical resource. When Ancestry took over, they launched a new mobile app, made an effort to improve customer service, and introduced various site improvements.

As of October 2017, Find A Grave contained over 165 million burial records and 75 million photos.

The site is completely free to use (unless you would like to pay to “sponsor” a memorial, which removes ads from the webpage). Users can create an account and search for their ancestors by entering their name, the year they were born, the year they died, and specifying the cemetery location, if it is known.

Memorial page for Russell Shaw

As an example, I have attached a screenshot of a completed search that I did for my 6^th great-grandfather, Russell Shaw. The profile of the memorial, shows the date of birth, date of death, places that each event occurred, and the burial location. In this case, the burial location is Baird Cemetery, which is located in Russellville, Brown County, Ohio. There is also a biography section and there are photos, both of him and of his grave marker.

Let’s go back to the cemetery. On Russell Shaw’s profile, you are able to click on the cemetery that he is buried in: Baird Cemetery. By clicking on the link, you are able to view photos of the cemetery that others have added. There is an information section which talks about the establishment of the cemetery, the location, and the maintenance of the cemetery. There is also a simple graph, which shows that the gravestones in the cemetery are “31% photographed”.

The webpage for Baird Cemetery

As a user, if I knew someone else buried in Baird Cemetery, for example, I can click on the “Add a Memorial” link. This will allow me to input information about the individual, upload photos, and add a biography to their memorial. If I added the memorial and was not able to visit the cemetery, there is also a section where you can submit a photo requests. Volunteers who use Find A Grave and live near the cemetery will visit, take photos of the gravestone, and submit them to the memorial.

Find A Grave also has about 30 video tutorials which demonstrate how to use certain features of the website. There is also a ‘Help’ section where the answers to frequently asked questions are presented for users. Although the videos are a good idea, they are not well presented. I would recommend checking out the ‘Help’ section first, rather than the videos.

Find A Grave has been a great resource for my genealogy research. I have discovered the burial locations for countless ancestors and I have also added a couple of my own memorials. The biography section has also been very helpful in my research. As expected, some family lines have better documentation of certain events or have passed stories down more successfully than others. So, I have been able to learn information about my ancestors that I might not have otherwise known, had it not been for distant cousins who posted the information about our shared ancestor. While this information can be very helpful, you do have to keep in mind that because all information on Find A Grave is user-submitted, it may not always been 100% correct.

Overall, I highly recommend Find A Grave to supplement your genealogical research by finding and recording information about burial and biographical information for your relatives, ancestors, and even favorite celebrities.

Sources:

https://www.findagrave.com/

https://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2013/09/30/ancestry-com-acquires-find-a-grave/?hootPostID=4138bfc02be3bbeec497222fbff15920