Find a Grave

Find a Grave is a collaborative 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." Users 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 250 million memorials.

Find a Grave was created in 1995 by Jim Tipton of Salt Lake City, Utah, to support his hobby of visiting the burial sites of famous celebrities. Tipton described his early childhood as a nerdy kid who a fascination for graves and an interest in HTML. He later added an online forum. Find a Grave was launched as a commercial entity in 1998, first as a trade name and then incorporated in 2000.

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.

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."

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, 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 the following year.

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.

Interment listings are added by individuals, genealogical societies, cemetery associations, and other institutions such as the International Wargraves Photography Project.

Contributors must register as members to submit listings, called memorials, on the site. The submitter becomes the manager of the memorial, but may transfer management to another member. If a memorial's manager becomes inactive on the platform, their account will retain management of the memorial until after a year and 30 days of inactivity, at which point management is automatically transferred to Find a Grave's account, from which any member can transfer management of the memorial to their own account. Only the current manager of a memorial may edit it, although any member may use the site's features to send correction requests to the memorial's manager; a suggested edit that is not manually processed by the manager within three weeks is automatically accepted. 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. Links to external websites and email addresses are not allowed.