Website Tool: Find A Grave

Find A Grave (http://www.findagrave.com/) is a resource used to find your ancestors in cemeteries and gravestones around the World. Pictures of gravestones are taken by volunteers in the area of the cemetery. It is also fun to search out celebrities of interest for those travelers who like to visit celebrity sites. Find A Grave was recently purchased in 2013 by Ancestry.com.

Highlights:
-Researchers can search cemeteries without leaving the comfort of their own homes.
-If your family member is not showing up and you know they are there you can request a picture be taken and volunteers in the area promptly go to the cemetery and take a picture for you.
-For those looking for volunteer opportunities, anyone can be a picture taker. Help in the work of visiting the local cemeteries in your area and snap a few photos.


Take Note:
-Searching for "John Adams" in the general search engine of 121 million graves will not pull up a result given the number of people with that name. Also, if you add too many details then your search may be too specific and the result will be the search might not be able to pull up the name you are looking for. You may have to play around with how you are searching to get the results you are looking for.

Researcher Tip:
-Gravestones are a great place to find birth dates, death dates, family name information, direction on where a person may have lived, religious affiliation, and other details. You would hope that the information carved in stone is accurate, but use these details as secondary sources to help you find the primary sources that you are looking for like a death certificate.
 

Find a Grave recently released an App for the I-Phone. They are expected to release one for Android soon.

Find A Grave is a great resource for researchers. It is a fun website to use and with the number of gravestone and cemeteries includes you can have great success finding your family.