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.
Find a Grave
Memorial Search Result for Elizabeth Cruckshank
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.
