Articles

By Mason Pickett

Thursday, July 20, 2023 

Updated February 4, 2024

Note: This article is an independent article and is not sponsored or paid by Find A Grave, Ancestry, or other companies.

Say you are an aspiring genealogist, one, that hopes to uncover each and every detail of your family tree, however, you see all the services that are paywalled, such as Ancestry.com. There is, however, a free service, Find A Grave, a database of millions of graves...there's a good chance one of your deceased family members is on here.

To get started, all you have to do is create an account, which is free. Some people use FindAGrave for research purposes only, others contribute. To test the waters a little bit, I would advise looking up a deceased family member's grave, with name and dates. If a result doesn't pop up, that is surprising. 

Now it's time to start using FindAGrave for practical purposes, maybe to find an ancestor. On the main page, put in the name and the date of death. This is vague enough to give you a few memorial pages that  could be relevant, but if that doesn't turn up anything, try spelling the name phonetically, or using the "-/+ X years" feature. 

Lets say you found your ancestor or family member. There's a few options. If its a close family member, you can request the memorial to be transferred to you. You could leave a digital flower, a token of remembrance, or even plant a tree in their name.

But say you want to do stuff. Now it's time to get out and about. The easiest way to contribute to FindAGrave is by taking pictures of graves. Go to your local cemetery and take some pictures. You don't have to photograph the entire cemetery. Also, check to see if said cemetery has any "photo requests." These are requests another member has made for a photo of a certain grave. Look at it's details, Click "claim," and when your done taking the photo, click "fulfill" to upload the photo. 

Great! Now your done taking photos. A good strategy is to go to the cemetery's FindAGrave page, this can usually be found by googling "cemetery FindAGrave." (replace 'cemetery' with name of the cemetery you took photos of.) Now, where it gives you an option to search memorials, start going through your photos you took, and search the names. Individually add each photo to the memorial page. There's a good chance you took a photo of a newer grave. It may not be listed in the cemetery.

To get around this, go to the main page of FindAGrave and enter the person's details. A listing may come up, created by a "stat hunter," or a controversial FindAGrave contributor obsessed with their stats being as high as possible. Anyways, add the photo of the memorial, then if burial info is incorrect, suggest it by clicking "Suggest Edits" and inputting the name of the cemetery. 

If the memorial page didn't come up, create it! Go to the main page and click "Add a Memorial." Go through the steps, and, done! You just created your first memorial. Go back to your profile and customize it. 

Another method to adding photos is the transcription feature, which can save lots of time and is more effecient if you have lots of photos to upload. Go to the FindAGrave home page, click on the pencil in a box icon, upload your photos and assign them to the correct cemetery, and now you have two options: 

1. Transcribe them yourself

2. After 7 days, the photos are avaliable for anyone in the community to transcribe.

Now you've gotten a start on FindAGrave, one of the most prominent genealogy resources. 

By Mason Pickett

Friday, February 2, 2024

Updated May 8, 2024 & February 24, 2026

On FindAGrave, (yes, I know, this is my third FG article. I'll move onto something else soon) there are cemetery and memorial records created by thousands around the world. As of now (original article publication date), FG claims more than 238 million memorial pages, with, doing the math, 8.2 million memorial pages a year. 

On FindAGrave, you can find most cemeteries are registered here. But many are not, specifically in remote areas. In addition, outside of the US and Canada, many memorial pages are missing or have limited information, and how FAG users like cglo, who has been on for only 2 years, can amass thousands of memorials, specifically in his home country of Germany. When I visited England in December of 2023, I photographed the Moravian Burial Ground, and I had to create a memorial for every photo I took except for John Cennick, who's photo I uploaded to fulfill a 5 year old photo request.

Other times, you have to create not only many memorials, but the cemetery itself. New cemetery listings on Find A Grave are becoming increasingly rare, as most of the work was done when FindAGrave was created. However, countless cemeteries across the world remain undocumented in third world countries or hard to access areas.

On January 21, 2024, I created Calhoun Cemetery, for members of the Calhoun Family in Spalding County, GA, as well as their cousins and associates. I estimated from aerial images of the cemetery that there are approximately 20 burials in the cemetery. I created all 20, and potentially a 21st, however, it only states on this person, Richard Griggs, Jr., that his burial was in Vaughn, Georgia. When I visited in August, I confirmed that he was there.

I discovered this cemetery last July, but never got around to putting it on FindAGrave until January this year, when I discovered one person who was buried in it: Evelyn Ross Robinson. Keep in mind I didn't know the name of the cemetery. I used my Newspapers.com subscription to find that she was buried in "Calhoun Cemetery." So I created her memorial.

Curious, I went on Newspapers.com AGAIN, and used the search term "Calhoun Cemetery in Vaughn, GA." That led me to many memorials in the cemetery over the period of the next few days, with the oldest dating back to August 1939, and as stated before, Richard Griggs, Jr., who died in January of 1920, could also possibly be buried there. I presume there may be older memorials in the cemetery.

What surprised me most was that the cemetery didn't cease burials in the 50's, when post-war urbanization was at it's peak: the most recent burial was in October of 2019. But my work was far from finished. That August, I made a trip to the cemetery, where I found 30 more graves that didn't have obituaries, an entire section I had no idea existed, and photographed it all. Now it's all up there, for anyone to see and use for their own research.

So: get out there, research and visit rural cemeteries, and put them on the map.