Source:Find A Grave

Source Find A Grave
Coverage
Subject Cemetery records
Publication information
Type Website
Citation
Find A Grave.
Repositories
Find A Gravehttp://www.findagrave.com/Free website


Contents

Overview

A constantly growing database of cemetery listings, mostly in the U.S., but including some in Canada and worldwide. As of early 2015, gravesites of more than 120,000,000 persons are included. Separate interfaces allow for searching of graves of famous persons (by name or "category of fame") and of ordinary people. Searches can be made by individual's name, location of cemetery, or cemetery name. Subsequent searches can produce a list of everyone of the same surname in that cemetery, or in that county or state. All additions to the database (except for some in the "famous" section) are made by volunteers, and additional information can be uploaded and associated with a particular gravesite. Information found for each gravesite generally includes name, dates, plot number, the contributor's name, the date the record was added, and the Find-a-Grave ID number. "Memorials" may be added by visitors to the web page.

Wikipedia

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Find a Grave is a website that allows the public to search and add to an online database of 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 2022, the site claimed more than 210 million memorials.

Citation

See below. When associated with an individual, the specific memorial page (URL) at Find A Grave should be created by use of the Fgravemem wiki template. Cemetery place pages should also refer to the Find A Grave cemetery page, if one exists, by using the Fgravecem template.

Usage Tips

A large percentage of listings now include a photograph of the grave marker, and often one of the cemetery entrance as well. A request may be filed for a volunteer living near a cemetery to take a photo of a specific grave marker if one has not already been posted. (If you're planning a visit to a particular cemetery, the Find-a-Grave volunteer community encourages you to make a list of photo requests for that location and to take along your digital camera -- especially if you're requesting help for other cemeteries yourself.)

NOTE: While the spirit of volunteerism at Find A Grave means that a great many new grave listings are constantly being added, it also means that the information found must be used judiciously. It is known, for instance, that some volunteers have added large numbers of grave listings from published books, without ever having visited the cemetery themselves. An error in the book is thus carried over to the website with no indication of the source of the faulty information. At the least, well-meaning persons sometimes expand the information found on the grave marker from untrustworthy sources like World Family Tree --e.g., adding a month and day when the stone lists only a year, or adding a wife's presumed maiden name. Corrections may be suggested, however, by internal email to the volunteer who "owns" a particular gravesite.

Another problem is that some grave markers are memorial stones only and the individual's remains are elsewhere. Also, years ago some cemeteries placed stone markers with names on a grave site when the site was sold to be replaced by a stone placed by the family when the grave was occupied. These cemetery markers are showing up on Find A Grave as burials when in fact the grave still remains empty.

Bottom line: if there is no picture of a gravestone, this source loses what primary value it could have. If there is a picture, but the gravestone has modern etching or includes dates after the death of the principal person, one must suspect that it represents family tradition as selected by some descendant. Indiscriminate use of Find A Grave without critical analysis or confirmation may introduce errors into one's research.

Recommendation: Indicate quality of a record from this source as "secondary". It can be useful to distinguish content which is found on a headstone image from other information by indicating in a Note what information in your addition is "corroborated by headstone image" (example: Person:Martha Steele (25); see also Source talk:Find A Grave#Added a couple of recommendation statements .5B25 March 2015.5D for some discussion on this topic)

Recommendation - Family support: In those cases where a man and a woman's names are present on a headstone and there is a qualifier such as "parents" or "husband"/"wife", this is indicative of primary support for a family-by-marriage relationship; do not assume that there is a family-by-marriage relationship in the absence of such qualifiers.

Photographs

Photographs on Find A Grave are not in the public domain. Do not download a photograph from there and post it here. The best thing to do is link to the person's memorial page using the examples shown below.

Photographs from Find A Grave will be deleted unless there is clear indication on the image page that the uploader either took the photograph or has permission from the copyright owner to use it on WeRelate (including agreeing to WeRelate's licensing).

Examples

Burial link

While important to add, the URL for a Find A Grave person or cemetery page can be a little ugly. For example:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6710527

This happens to be the current URL for Stephen Longfellow - but that is hardly obvious. There is also the possibility that, over the long term, minor details of the URL will change (imagine if "findagrave" became a non-profit and started to appear on ".org" instead of ".com"). A wiki template - Fgravemem - has been created to protect against that sort of change, using the "GRid=" value and the page title while also creating a nice active link.

{{Fgravemem|6710527|Stephen Longfellow}} -> Stephen Longfellow

Examples that make use of the above syntax:

Another option which has been used by some people is to avoid using the name of the person in the display but opt for a more generic term, such as "Grave Recorded" (as in this example).

Cemetery link

A similar template has been created to also allow cemeteries known in Find A Grave to be conveniently referenced, such as in a corresponding WeRelate place page (use the "Crid=" value and the page title).

{{Fgravecem|91030|Granary Burying Ground}} -> Find A Grave: Granary Burying Ground

Examples that make use of the above syntax:

This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Find a Grave. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.