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Type of site | Online database |
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Available in | English French German Spanish Italian Dutch Portuguese Swedish |
Headquarters | Lehi, Utah, U.S. |
Owners | Ancestry.com (2013–present) |
Founder(s) | Jim Tipton |
URL | www |
Commercial | Yes |
Registration | Optional |
Launched | 1998 |
Current status | Active |
Find a Grave is a website that allows the public to search and add to an online database of human and pet 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 2024 [update] , the site claimed more than 238 million memorials. [1]
Find a Grave was created in 1995 by Salt Lake City, Utah, resident Jim Tipton to support his hobby of visiting the burial sites of famous celebrities. [3] Tipton classified his early childhood as being a nerdy kid who had somewhat of a fascination with graves and some love for learning HTML. [4] He later added an online forum. [5] Find a Grave was launched as a commercial entity in 1998, first as a trade name [6] and then incorporated in 2000. [7] [8]
In 2010, Find a Grave expanded to include graves of non-celebrities, in order to allow online visitors to pay respect to their deceased relatives or friends. [9] [10]
In 2013, Tipton sold Find a Grave to Ancestry.com, stating the genealogy company had "been linking and driving traffic to the site for several years. Burial information is a wonderful source for people researching their family history." According to a press release, Ancestry.com officials said they would "launch a new mobile app, improve customer support, [and] introduce an enhanced edit system for submitting updates to memorials, foreign-language support, and other site improvements." [11]
In 2017, a beta website for a redesigned Find a Grave was launched at gravestage.com. From May 29 to July 10 of that year, the beta website was migrated to new.findagrave.com, [12] and a new front end for it was deployed at beta.findagrave.com. The new site became live at the end of the year, and the old site was deprecated and officially retired in 2018 the following year. [2]
The website contains listings of cemeteries and graves from around the world. American cemeteries are organized by state and county, and many cemetery records contain Google Maps (with GPS coordinates supplied by contributors) and photographs of the cemeteries and gravesites. Individual grave records may contain dates and places of birth and death, biographical information, cemetery and plot information, photographs (of the grave marker, the individual, etc.), and contributor information. [13]
Interment listings are added by individuals, [14] genealogical societies, [15] cemetery associations, and other institutions such as the International Wargraves Photography Project. [16]
Contributors must register as members to submit listings, called memorials, on the site. The submitter becomes the manager of the listing, but may transfer management. Only the current manager of a listing may edit it, although any member may use the site's features to send correction requests to the listing's manager. Managers may add links to memorials of deceased spouses and parents for genealogical purposes. Deceased children's memorials that are linked to their parents' memorials will appear on the parents' memorials as their children. They will also appear as siblings of other deceased children whose memorials have been linked to the same parents. [17] Links to external websites and email addresses are not allowed. [18]
Any member may also add photographs and notations to individual listings; notations may include images of flowers, flags, religious, or other symbols, and often include a message of sympathy or condolence. Members may post requests for photos of a specific grave; these requests will be automatically sent to other members who have registered their location as being near that grave. [19]
The website is often recommended as a resource for genealogy research. [20] [21] [22] [23]
Find a Grave also maintains lists of memorials of famous persons by their "claim to fame", such as Medal of Honor recipients, [24] religious figures, [25] and educators. [26] Find a Grave exercises editorial control over these listings. [27]
Starting on May 18, 2023, memorials may also be marked with a "Veteran" tag but the definition of the term Veteran used by Find A Grave [28] differs from that used in many countries, including the United States.
Website policy is to remove memorials or transfer their management at the request of an immediate family member. [29] In January 2022, following complaints, Find a Grave announced a new policy for memorials of recently deceased persons. [30] Under the new policy, any photos or personal information, including obituaries, are hidden for three months. [31] [32]
Glasnevin Cemetery is a large cemetery in Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland which opened in 1832. It holds the graves and memorials of several notable figures, and has a museum.
Memorial Day is one of the federal holidays in the United States for honoring and mourning the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. It is observed on the last Monday of May. Memorial Day is also considered the unofficial beginning of summer in the United States.
Arlington National Cemetery is one of two cemeteries in the United States National Cemetery System that are maintained by the United States Army. Nearly 400,000 people are buried in its 639 acres in Arlington County, Virginia.
Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a full-service cemetery, funeral home, crematory, and cultural events center which regularly hosts community events such as live music and summer movie screenings. It is one of the oldest cemeteries in Los Angeles, California and is located at 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hollywood. It was founded in 1899 as Hollywood Cemetery, and, from 1939, was known as Hollywood Memorial Park until 1998 when it was given its current name. The studios of Paramount Pictures are located at the south end of the same block, on 40 acres (16 ha) that were once part of the cemetery and held no interments.
Woodlawn Cemetery is one of the largest cemeteries in New York City and a designated National Historic Landmark. Located south of Woodlawn Heights, Bronx, New York City, it has the character of a rural cemetery. Woodlawn Cemetery opened during the Civil War in 1863, in what was then Yonkers, in an area that was annexed to New York City in 1874. It is notable in part as the final resting place of some well-known figures.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) is an intergovernmental organisation of six independent member states whose principal function is to mark, record and maintain the graves and places of commemoration of Commonwealth of Nations military service members who died in the two World Wars. The commission is also responsible for commemorating Commonwealth civilians who died as a result of enemy action during the Second World War. The commission was founded by Sir Fabian Ware and constituted through Royal Charter in 1917 as the Imperial War Graves Commission. The change to the present name took place in 1960.
Brookwood Cemetery, also known as the London Necropolis, is a burial ground in Brookwood, Surrey, England. It is the largest cemetery in the United Kingdom and one of the largest in Europe. The cemetery is listed a Grade I site in the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
A gravestone, headstone, or tombstone is a marker, usually stone, that is placed over a grave. Especially old or elaborate stone slabs may be called a funeral stele, stela, or slab. The use of such markers is traditional for Chinese, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic burials, as well as other traditions. In East Asia, the tomb's spirit tablet is the focus for ancestral veneration and may be removable for greater protection between rituals. Ancient grave markers typically incorporated funerary art, especially details in stone relief. With greater literacy, more markers began to include inscriptions of the deceased's name, date of birth, and date of death, often along with a personal message or prayer. The presence of a frame for photographs of the deceased is also increasingly common.
A mass grave is a grave containing multiple human corpses, which may or may not be identified prior to burial. The United Nations has defined a criminal mass grave as a burial site containing three or more victims of execution, although an exact definition is not unanimously agreed upon. Mass graves are usually created after many people die or are killed, and there is a desire to bury the corpses quickly for sanitation concerns. Although mass graves can be used during major conflicts such as war and crime, in modern times they may be used after a famine, epidemic, or natural disaster. In disasters, mass graves are used for infection and disease control. In such cases, there is often a breakdown of the social infrastructure that would enable proper identification and disposal of individual bodies.
Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery is a federal military cemetery in the city of San Diego, California. It is located on the grounds of the former Army coastal artillery station Fort Rosecrans and is administered by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. The cemetery is located approximately 10 miles (16 km) west of Downtown San Diego, overlooking San Diego Bay and the city from one side, and the Pacific Ocean on the other. Fort Rosecrans is named after William Starke Rosecrans, a Union general in the American Civil War. The cemetery was registered as California Historical Landmark #55 on December 6, 1932. The cemetery is spread out over 77.5 acres (31.4 ha) located on both sides of Catalina Blvd.
An unmarked grave is one that lacks a marker, headstone, or nameplate indicating that a body is buried there. However, in cultures that mark burial sites, the phrase unmarked grave has taken on a metaphorical meaning.
Ancestry.com LLC is an American genealogy company based in Lehi, Utah. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical, historical records, and related genetic genealogy websites.
Interment.net is a United States-based website containing a free online database of transcriptions from headstones, intended to be a research tool for use by genealogists and historians. As of 2006, the site was one of the top 15 free genealogy websites on the Internet. Its cemetery database to date includes more than 6 million cemetery records from around the world.
Camp Nelson National Cemetery is a United States National Cemetery located in southern Jessamine County, Kentucky. It was originally a graveyard associated with the U.S. Army's Camp Nelson, which was active during the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath. The camp was named for Major General William "Bull" Nelson, commander of the Civil War Army of Kentucky, who was murdered by a fellow officer in 1862.
The Confederate Memorial State Historic Site is a state-owned property occupying approximately 135 acres (55 ha) near Higginsville, Missouri. From 1891 to 1950, the site was used as an old soldiers' home for veterans of the Confederate States Army after the American Civil War. The Missouri state government then took over operation of the site after the last veteran died in 1950, using it as a state park. In 1981, a cottage, a chapel, and the Confederate cemetery were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Confederate Chapel, Cemetery and Cottage. The chapel was moved from its original position in 1913, but was returned in 1978. It has a tower and a stained glass window. The cottage is a small wooden building, and the cemetery contains 723 graves. Within the cemetery is a monument erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy which is modeled on the Lion of Lucerne. In addition to the cemetery and historic structures, the grounds also contain trails, picnic sites, and fishing ponds.
Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Paris, France, at 44 hectares or 110 acres. With more than 3.5 million visitors annually, it is the most visited necropolis in the world. Notable figures in the arts buried at Père Lachaise include: Colette, Michel Ney, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Frédéric Chopin, George Enescu, Édith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Georges Méliès, Marcel Marceau, Olivia de Havilland, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, J. R. D. Tata, Georges Bizet, Jim Morrison, and Sir Richard Wallace.
Canadian Headstones is a project to capture digital images and the complete transcription of cemetery stones. It is a web-based Canadian non-profit corporation run completely by volunteers.
Sydney March (1876–1968) was an English sculptor. His primary focus was portrait busts and other sculptures of British royalty and contemporary figures, as well as war memorials. The second-born of eight artists in his family, he and his siblings completed the National War Memorial of Canada after the death of their brother Vernon March in 1930, who had created the winning design. It is the site in Ottawa of annual Remembrance Day ceremonies.
The musicians of the Titanic were a septet orchestra who performed chamber music in the first class section aboard the ship.
The United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Korea, located at Tanggok in the Nam District, City of Busan, Republic of Korea, is a burial ground for United Nations Command (UNC) casualties of the Korean War. It contains 2,300 graves and is the only United Nations cemetery in the world. Laid out over 14 hectares, the graves are set out in 22 sites designated by the nationalities of the buried servicemembers.
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)"At some point, I said, 'I am sick of drawing the lines of who is famous and who isn't. I'm just going to accept everyone,' " Tipton says.
The entries with tombstone photographs obviously are reliable, but if the entry is based only on a paper record of the interment (without a photograph), it's easy to mistype the date, so you're bound to find errors.