Finding Gravestones of Our Ancestors

Where Might They Be?

Finding the graves of our ancestors in the past was a very difficult thing to do - especially if your family was a "traveling family" who often moved from one location to another. We could not always just hop in our cars and take an extended tour of another province or state in hopes of finding where they were buried.

That has changed greatly with the advent of the internet, and the proliferation of records available to us from our desks at home, or on our cell phones wherever we may be.

There are now sites dedicated to helping others find your ancestors. Thousands of volunteers, historical and genealogical society members, and local churches and municipal governments have started to record cemeteries digitally, through photos and transcribed listings of tombstones all over the world. And they are available to us, complete with indexes to them, at a few keystrokes of our devices hooked to the internet.

Below are some of those sites - only a small handful of them. I will add more as I come across them, and you are welcome to add your own. Send me the information on my Contact Me form. I thank you in advance for contributing to all of us who are working on our family stories.

One of the most widely-known and used sites for finding the gravesites of our ancestors is Find a Grave. It is a constantly growing effort with many volunteers adding individual gravesite information and, very often, also photographs of the individual graves. Additionally, it is not uncommon to find someone has added the text of an obituary for that individual. It also gives the cemetery information such as name, alternate names and addresses, usually the GPS coordinates, and a google map of its location.

Another site which is growing and has many volunteers adding information about graves, and cemeteries, but no photos, is Interment.net. It has become a site which has aggregated many sources that have been out there but hard to find. In most cases, the site is composed of lists of burials for cemeteries. It describes itself as "A free online library of cemetery records from thousands of cemeteries across the world, for historical and genealogy research."

If you are looking for information about World War I and II cemeteries for British Commonwealth countries, then the Commonwealth War Graves Commision site is for you.

If your family military person served for the United States, try the Veterans Administration grave locator site. You can enter the veteran's name, and find out where that veteran is buried, be it a National Cemetery or a local cemetery with a veteran's stone.

Be Prepared to Look Wider!