Cemetery Gravestones & Court Records

On October 2, Lisa did a wonderful blog on doing cemetery research Cemeteries...where else would you find your dead relatives?

Next week, you will have the opportunity to take your cemetery research even further with Jill Keppler's talk on Cemetery Gravestones on 30 October. Learn what stories the stones themselves have to tell.

 SIGN UP HERE.

And there are still spots available at the Genealogy Slam: Order in the Court!

Sign up HERE.

Did I mention that Light Refreshments will be served and Door Prizes will be given away?!?!

I seek dead people!

No, I am not a vampire hunter! ALL genealogists seek dead people! Once we move past researching our living relatives, it is all we do.





As genealogists, we are trained to work from the most recent events to the furthest past. So when we learn the name of a new ancestor or relative, what we are looking for first is the death record. 

One of the quickest ways to track down an ancestor's death date is to search for their tombstone on one of the online cemetery sites. There are three main ones:

1. Interment.net
2. BillionGraves
3. Find A Grave

1. Interment.net Interment.net is a publisher of cemetery transcriptions for use by genealogists and local historians. Visitors use this site to help locate burials of family & friends, trace family history and learn something about cemeteries in general. 

2. Billion Graves Their goal is to preserve precious records found in cemeteries throughout the world. Using modern technology, they capture images of headstones with their GPS locations so users worldwide can access those records anywhere.

3. Find A Grave  Find a Grave's mission is to find, record and present final disposition information from around the world as a virtual cemetery experience.  

Each of the sites provide pictures and ways for volunteers to participate. You can narrow your search by location, first names, dates of death, etc.

My favorite is Find A Grave. It has a cleaner look with less advertisement. Plus, more volunteers work for Find A Grave resulting in many more search returns. For example, search for the surname JOHNSON on each of the sites. Interment returns 6,100 hits, BillionGraves, returns 94,000 and Findagrave finds 190,250 JOHNSON graves!

The draw back to these sites is that they mostly cover deaths that have occurred in the last 150-200 years. If the cemetery or the tombstone no  longer exists, they will not cover them.

If you are looking for a veteran that was buried in one of the US Veteran's cemeteries, you will want to check out the Department of Veterans Affairs Gravesite Locator.

For other cemetery transcriptions, remember to search the county's USGenWeb site for cemetery listings.

Now get out there and dig up some dead relatives!

But not literally...