A Guide
to Searching the Find a Grave website
Why Use Find a Grave?
The Find a Grave website is one of the most popular tools for genealogists to locate burials and cemeteries both within Australia and internationally. This site is a way of seeing a headstone on an ancestor’s grave that you may never get to travel to. By becoming a member, you can also connect with other members and contact distant cousins.
History of the Find a Grave Website
Launching in 1998, Find a Grave[i] was created by an American man, Jim Tipton, as a way of combining the graves of celebrities and famous people into one website. Since then, it has grown into an international site incorporating over 450,000 cemeteries in 246 different countries, hosting over 205 million graves. Most memorials are now of ordinary people rather than celebrities. It was sold to Ancestry[ii] in 2013.
The standard abbreviation for Find a Grave is FG rather than other acronyms which can cause offence.
In addition to Find a Grave’s memorials being available as hints on Ancestry[iii] they are also available via the FamilySearch[iv] website.
Their 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.”[v] The site is basically free to use, although sponsoring a memorial will remove the advertisements from the page.
Find a Grave is available as a website or as an app on both the Apple and Android platforms. This guide will explore using the website.
Signing in to the Find a Grave Website
While Find a Grave is free, it is recommended that you create an account for yourself so you can save your favourite memorials and cemeteries, as well as personalising the experience and allowing messaging to and from other members.
To
become a member, go to the top right corner of the home page and click on Sign
Up. Enter your name and email address, a pseudonym or public name if
desired, and review their Terms and Conditions[vi] and Privacy Statement[vii] before agreeing that
you aren’t a robot, then click on Create Account. How much you want to
interact with other members is totally up to you, and you can change these
settings at any time. Signing up will give you a Member ID number.
Searching for a Memorial by Name
 |
| Find a Grave Memorial Advanced Search Page |
The first tab on the home screen is Memorials. Clicking here will bring up the memorial search screen and a list of your saved memorials if you have already saved these as a member. Not every burial in every cemetery is already recorded, so your search may not find who you are looking for. You have the option to create a new memorial for people so they can be added to the website and the corresponding databases on Ancestry and FamilySearch.
- For
common names, entering just a name into the search fields could give you too
many results, so try and refine your search criteria as much as possible by
including the year of death (if known). This can be refined to make it the
Exact year, Before that year, After that year, or +/- 1 year, +/- 3 years, 5,
10, or 25 years. Try different spelling variations or think about how a name
might have been misspelled.
- If you know that the grave is in a particular state of Australia, use that parameter in your Cemetery Location field so you can avoid international results that will not be the burial you are looking for.
- The year of birth is less likely to help you find a search result as most graves have a date of death and age, for example, 1st January 1960 age 47, which makes a presumption about the year of birth. If you know them, these finer details can subsequently be added or edited on the Memorial page.
- Standard search tools can be used. Using a ? symbol replaces one letter, eg Sm?th could result in Smith and Smyth. Using the * represents the potential for many letters, eg William* will result in Williams, Williamson.
- The Advanced Search feature allows for many other search filter options such as similar name spellings and nicknames, among others parameters.
- When you find the person you are searching for there could be anything from very basic information, or all of the fields completed, depending on who recorded the information. Some cemetery burial data is compiled by a volunteer photographer walking through a cemetery and photographing every gravestone. They then upload these photographs to create new memorials. Other volunteer transcribers then populate the information fields from viewing the images, depending on how much information is written on the headstone. Some graves are so weathered that the epitaph cannot be read clearly, if at all.
- Clicking on the search result will open the individual’s memorial page. There may be photos of the person, their gravesite, or even their death notice from the newspaper, depending on who has uploaded the images.
The image above shows a memorial with all the fields completed. It gives the person’s full name, including a married woman’s maiden name in italics. Their full date and place of birth and death are included, as well as the details of which cemetery they are buried in and the plot information. Clicking on any of the hyperlinks will open more information and clicking on the cemetery name will take you to a profile of that cemetery, all the recorded burials there and its location.
Each memorial has an ID number. This memorial includes photos of the headstone from various angles, as well as more photos in the lower section of the page. Clicking on the Photos tab opens these into a page of larger images. Clicking on each image will enlarge it further. All the potential family information that Find a Grave allows is shown, and you can build a replica of your family tree on Find a Grave by linking children to their parents via their memorial ID numbers in the Suggest Edits field.
To add each child, go to the Child’s memorial and add their parents by their ID number. To add siblings, add the same parents for each of the children. Having Find a Grave open in multiple tabs is recommended for this process.
If you are the owner of the memorial, you can make any changes yourself. This memorial example was created by another member, and they can approve or reject any suggestions that you submit. If you upload photos to an existing memorial, you have the option to remove them even if you are not the creator of the memorial.
Each memorial has the option to Share the result to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Email. The Save To button allows you to save the result to Ancestry, a Virtual Cemetery that you have created, Copy it to the Clipboard, or Print it.
Adding Flowers to a memorial via the Flowers tab gives you the ability to leave an image of a flower and an optional note. There are 43 flowers to choose from, or you can change the category to one of the following and pick another type of image: Fun Flowers, Flowers (photos), Children, Holidays, Veterans, Religious, Sports and Leisure, Occupations, Flags, Memorial Ribbons, Animals, or Miscellaneous.
Leaving
a flower or other icon allows other researchers to see who has also been
interested in this grave and allows a method for them to contact you via Find a
Grave’s internal messaging service.
Searching for a Memorial by Cemetery
The Cemeteries tab allows you to search by Cemetery Name, Cemetery Location, or on the map. Typing in a cemetery name could give multiple results in the same area, and you can also add the Location, then Search, to narrow these down further. Once you find the cemetery you were looking for, click on its name and a search box will open where you can search for a particular memorial, or all the people with a certain surname in that cemetery, for example.
You can Share this cemetery’s details by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Email; you can tag this cemetery as Favorited so you can find it easily in the future, and you can Volunteer as a photographer in that location. Often there are many photos of the general cemetery itself on the cemetery’s homepage and clicking on View Memorials will open a list of all the memorials in that location. This page will tell you how many memorials have been saved to Find a Grave, and what percentage of these have been photographed, including what percentage have a corresponding GPS location embedded. The GPS feature in the Find a Grave app allows you to be directed to the exact grave location within the cemetery. This page also links to a map of the cemetery, allowing you to get directions to the site.
[i] Find a
Grave https://www.findagrave.com/
[ii]
Ancestry.com https://www.ancestry.com/
[iii] Find a
Grave collection on Ancestry.com https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/60528/
[iv] Find a
Grave collection on FamilySearch.org https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/2221801
[v] Find a
Grave: Our Goal https://www.findagrave.com/about
[vi] Ancestry.com:
Terms and Conditions https://www.ancestry.com/c/legal/termsandconditions
[vii] Ancestry.com: Your Privacy https://www.ancestry.com/c/legal/privacystatement
