Finding a Grave

Many of you know I work regularly on searching for information. One of the hardest things I have searched for is finding where people are actually buried. Even if you find someone that attended a funeral, they do not always remember the name of a cemetery.

With the onslaught of people looking for genealogy information there have been many people that have stepped up to help with this problem. People have gone and walked through cemeteries writing information from tombstones, taking pictures of the tombstones, some people have walked with video cameras capturing the tombstones, people have done rubbings on the tombstones with crayons or even chalk. Many of these people have published books with this information. The books are then sold, but soon go out of print or so I have found. Then along came the internet. People began to publish the information for free on the internet on various websites. This is much better than a book, as a book is outdated usually before it is published.

There is of course a flaw in this system. If you are only collecting information from tombstones, then you are missing most likely many graves in a cemetery. There are some people that are buried and never get a tombstone, so they are over looked in this transcription process.

If you stop at a cemetery office, they will of course tell you where a grave is located in their cemetery. Sometimes they charge a look up fee, especially if you go in and tell them you are doing genealogy or family history work. Also at the office they give you a map, so you can navigate your way through the cemetery. I recently visited a cemetery that was 100 acres, so walking the whole cemetery looking for a specific grave would have taken a very long time.

A quick place to look for a grave or even add a grave information is at www.findagrave.com . This is a free to use site, but it is a commercial site and it does have a lot of pop-ups, so beware before you get started. While at the site you can look up any name, in any location. I have tried to go in and start putting some of the information that I already have on hand. So you might be able to find some people if you start searching there. Also on this website people can place pictures of the tombstones, which is a really great feature. I need to resize my pictures before I can post them, but I will be posting quite a few pictures. I have been including some obituaries if I already had them on my computer. I have some that need to be transcribed, which I will work on.

To make a search on this website easier, I put a link at the bottom of my blog. So if you scroll all the way to the bottom, just make sure you come back and finishing reading though, you can search from here to there.

If you do not want to add anything to this site yourself, but would like for me to add some information I would be happy to do so. Just send me an email with the information and a picture if you have one. I will update on the website a couple of times a week or as I have time. If you find an error in something that was submitted, oops please just let me know and I will correct it.

Happy searching.......