findagrave.com
findagrave.com is a free online cemetery and memorial database owned by Ancestry that helps people locate burial sites, research family history, and preserve information about deceased individuals through community contributions.
What Is Find a Grave and Who Owns It?
Find a Grave is an online resource for discovering burial locations, viewing gravestone photographs, and exploring memorial records from cemeteries worldwide. It serves genealogists, family historians, cemetery researchers, and people searching for the final resting places of relatives or historical figures.
The website began in 1995 when Jim Tipton created a platform focused on the graves of famous people. Its coverage subsequently expanded to include individuals from all backgrounds.
Ancestry acquired Find a Grave in September 2013. Although the service belongs to Ancestry, it operates as a separate platform with free access to its memorial database.
The scale of its collection is substantial. In 2026, the official mobile app listings described a database containing more than 250 million grave records across approximately half a million cemeteries. These figures come from the service's own descriptions rather than an independent database audit.
How Can You Find Someone's Grave on findagrave.com?
You can search for a person's burial information using Find a Grave's Memorial Search feature without creating an account.
Begin by entering the person's first and last name. Additional information, particularly a death year or possible cemetery location, can narrow the results.
The search tools provide several useful options:
- Search by first name, surname, and birth or death year.
- Restrict results to a particular cemetery or geographic location.
- Include a spouse, parent, child, or sibling in an advanced search.
- Search for alternative spellings or exact names.
- Filter records by availability of grave photographs, GPS coordinates, or plot information.
Find a Grave also supports wildcard searches. For example, entering Wil in a name field can help identify longer names beginning with those letters, while a question mark can replace a single uncertain character.
Once you locate a likely memorial, examine its dates, burial location, gravestone images, and family connections before deciding whether it matches the person you are researching.
If your search produces no relevant results, broaden the date range or remove restrictive location details. An unsuccessful search does not establish that the person has no grave or burial record.
The database depends on material submitted by contributors, so some cemeteries are more thoroughly documented than others.
Is Find a Grave Completely Free?
Find a Grave allows visitors to search memorials, view photographs, and explore cemetery records without paying a subscription fee.
Creating an account is also free. Registration requires a valid email address, and users must confirm their registration before participating in the community.
A registered account enables additional activities such as creating memorials, submitting photos, contacting contributors, and suggesting corrections.
However, Find a Grave also offers optional paid Site Sponsorship.
According to its official support documentation, the published sponsorship prices are $25 for six months or $50 for one year. Benefits include removing third-party banner advertisements and allowing two additional photographs on non-famous memorials when their standard photo limit has been reached.
Site Sponsorship is not available in every country. Its availability may depend on the member's location.
Importantly, payment is not required for ordinary grave searches or participation in the memorial community.
How Do Grave Photo Requests and Volunteer Contributions Work?
One distinctive feature of Find a Grave is its volunteer photography system.
If a memorial exists but lacks a gravestone photograph, a registered user can select the Request Photo option. The request is then made available to volunteers associated with the relevant cemetery.
Providing a plot number or other location details can make the request easier to fulfill.
Find a Grave currently allows members to submit up to 100 photo requests within a seven-day period. However, a request is not a guarantee that someone will visit the cemetery or upload an image.
Volunteers can contribute by photographing gravestones, recording GPS coordinates, transcribing inscriptions, creating missing memorials, and improving existing information.
When creating a memorial, contributors should first search for an existing record to avoid duplicates. Burial information should be verified rather than based solely on an assumption about where someone might be buried.
The platform also supports memorials for certain nontraditional final dispositions, including cremation, when relevant information is available.
Find a Grave does not operate as a cemetery office or professional grave-location investigation service. Questions requiring official burial registers, plot ownership details, or cemetery administration records should be directed to the appropriate cemetery.
Can You Correct a Memorial or Manage a Family Member's Record?
Find a Grave memorials are generally managed by the member who created them, unless management has been transferred.
A memorial manager can update personal details, burial information, biographies, and other memorial content.
If you discover incorrect information on a memorial managed by someone else, select Suggest Edits. Depending on the field, you can propose changes to names, dates, burial locations, grave plots, inscriptions, or family relationships.
The manager reviews suggested changes and may accept or decline them. Find a Grave also has a process for handling suggestions that remain unresolved.
Family members can request management of a relative's memorial. The service publishes eligibility guidelines covering relationships such as parents, children, spouses, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and first cousins, including certain step, adoptive, and in-law relationships.
For older memorials, the usual process begins by contacting the existing manager through the memorial's Suggest Edits section.
If an eligible family member encounters a refusal or receives no response within a reasonable period, Find a Grave support can review the request.
Management is not necessary simply to upload a photograph or suggest a correction.
What Happens When Someone Has Recently Died?
Find a Grave has specific protections intended to give families greater control over recently created memorials.
Under rules applying to non-famous memorials added after January 11, 2022, memorials created by people outside the qualifying family relationships have limited public visibility during the first three months after the person's death.
During the first year, eligible close relatives can use a dedicated management option to request control of those memorials.
The policy is intended to reduce conflicts over memorial management during a sensitive period.
Find a Grave also prohibits ordinary memorials for living individuals, although it recognizes a limited exception for someone documenting their own existing pre-need headstone.
Families who encounter privacy concerns, incorrect photographs, or information they believe should be removed can contact the memorial manager or submit a support request. Removal is subject to the platform's review procedures rather than being automatic in every case.
How Reliable Is Find a Grave for Genealogy Research?
Find a Grave is a valuable starting point for genealogical research, but its records should not automatically be treated as verified historical evidence.
The database contains contributions from volunteers using gravestones, cemetery records, obituaries, personal research, and other materials. Consequently, the reliability of individual entries can vary.
A photograph showing a legible grave inscription provides more direct evidence of what appears on the marker than an unsupported biographical statement. Even inscriptions can contain mistakes or differ from other historical records.
Researchers should compare important information with independent documentation, including death certificates, cemetery registers, historical newspapers, and official records.
Family connections listed on memorials also deserve verification, particularly where people share similar names or where multiple generations lived in the same area.
For historical projects, recording the memorial identification number and identifying the underlying evidence can help other researchers trace information accurately.
Photographs should also be treated with care. Being publicly viewable on Find a Grave does not necessarily mean an image is free to republish. Appropriate permission or licensing should be checked before reusing another contributor's work.
Can You Use Find a Grave on a Mobile Phone?
Find a Grave offers mobile applications for iOS and Android, allowing users to search memorials and contribute information while visiting cemeteries.
The apps support gravestone photography, GPS contributions, cemetery searches, and memorial management.
In June 2026, Find a Grave announced a redesigned mobile interface with improvements to navigation, accessibility, and cemetery searching. The update also introduced tools for walking toward a grave using available GPS information.
On supported memorials, users can access mapping or compass guidance to help locate a burial site within a cemetery.
This functionality depends on usable coordinates and device location services. Records without accurate GPS information may still require assistance from a cemetery map, plot number, or cemetery staff.
For family historians, the combination of searchable memorial records, community photographs, and location tools makes findagrave.com especially useful for discovering burial information and identifying leads for further research. Its greatest value comes from treating those discoveries as evidence to investigate and verify, rather than assuming every contributed detail is complete or correct.