Susan Farrell Bankhead, Certified Genealogist (sm)
Prowling a Cemetery at Night: Online Cemetery Records
Ancestors keeping you up at night? How about checking out a cemetery while you’re still in your pj’s and slippers?
The Internet is bringing us more graves and tombstone transcriptions every day.
Here’s a few sites worth checking:
Find A Grave is a free database 68 million grave records. This database grows daily as people upload their own photos or information about a family member’s tombstone. On this site, you may search by name or date, or browse by location. You may search by surname for all those who’s name starts with CH buried in Massachusetts.
Interment.net is another free database for of online cemetery records.
BillionGraves is a website where people are encouraged to download the BillionGraves app onto a smart phone, then go to a cemetery and use the app as you take pictures of ALL the tombstones. These photos are transferred to Billion Graves, and then anybody that wants to may transcribe the tombstones into the BillionGraves database. The only problem with this method that I can see is that if the tombstone photo is not legible, it may be transcribed wrong, or not transcribed at all. Still, it’s a great effort to provide a billion graves to the public.
Names In Stone has been named as Family Tree Magazine’s 101 Best Websites for 2011 and has over 868,000 records. This is a subscription database but you may sign up for a free limited access account to add cemetery information.
Sometimes counties or historical societies have their cemetery records online. Try USGenWeb and Linkpendium to find these.
Hopefully after you’ve found your ancestor, you’ll be able to get some sleep!
Susan, great post!
There is now also Resting Spot (www.restingspot.com). It’s kind of like BillionGraves, but you transcribe the tombstone yourself when you take the picture and upload it to their site.
Liz: I didn’t know about Resting Spot! Thank you for telling me and my readers! I’ll have to check it out. Have you worked with Resting Spot and can give us an idea how you liked that application compared to the others/ I appreciate your input.