Find a Grave

A New Cemetery Page

Over the past few months we’ve been working on and testing an update to the cemetery page.  Our main goals were to:

  • Make it easier to see what Find a Grave® has in the cemetery, including the number of memorials and the percentage of those memorials that have photos and GPS coordinates.
  • Add a map of memorials in the cemetery with GPS coordinates
  • Make the search more prominent
  • We also wanted to  make it easier to quickly see recently added memorials, famous memorials or all the memorials on the site for the cemetery.

Featuring GPS percentages and locations on the cemetery page is important because Find a Grave has been around a lot longer than most people have had a handy GPS device in their pocket, so many memorials on the site were created before GPS was convenient to add.  You can learn more about adding GPS coordinates here.

Even if your local cemetery seems to be completely documented on Find a Grave, this new cemetery page can help you find some work still waiting to be done there. The contributions box and ring chart keep track of member contributions and make it easy to see the types of contributions needed for cemetery.

While we were at it we added an option to see nearby cemeteries which has been very popular with our beta testers.

The image below shows the new cemetery page for the Columbus City Cemetery in Columbus, Indiana with the following new features highlighted:

  1. The search box moved to the top of the page
  2. The contribution box and ring chart 
  3. Tabs for viewing Photos and the improved Map page
  4. Options for viewing lists other than Recently added
  5. Nearby cemeteries

And here is an image of the new Map page that includes pins showing the location of memorials that have GPS coordinates. Clicking on a pin will show more details for that memorial. You can use the search at the left to search whatever portion of the map is in view. In this map view, the filter and search options only find memorials with GPS data.

If you are interested in looking at the new version of this page for your local cemetery, you can get to it by going to the current cemetery page and adding a /v2 directly after the .com in the website address. For example change: https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/1903871/columbus-city-cemetery to https://www.findagrave.com/v2/cemetery/1903871/columbus-city-cemetery

We really appreciate everyone who has been beta testing and helping us improve this page. If you have feedback, please share it in the comments below.

57 comments

  2. Love the new cemetery page! The new GPS locations make it very helpful to locate any grave. Hopefully people will now understand that adding a recent photo is very important to develop this GPS data for each memorial. Great job support staff!

  3. I can not seem to get the new page to come up on any cemetery I enter just the one you have in your email post.

    • Thanks, we have a fix in for this issue. The descriptions will show up on the cemetery page.

  5. Will this eventually be the standard format? Meaning will there always be 2 versions? One with the /v2 and one without?

  6. As usual none of your so called improvments make anything easier to use. You are the third or is it the forth company to own Ancestery? Each company has tried to make Anceatery its own and provide jobs for a lot of very young people who do not use Ancestery. All you do is make it much more difficult for the seniors who do use it. It takes more “clicks” to enter anything. You concept of what color and size should be is so far off it is frightingto think you are running this planet now.

  7. I don’t use a phone for pictures…I still use a camera and it doesn’t have GPS… GPS is not in my future when making memorials on FG… Sorry

    • Thanks, we have a fix in for this issue. The descriptions will show up on the cemetery page.

  10. I notice that the example, and a cemetery I work, both say “this cemetery currently has no description” under “About”. but both actually DO have descriptions, so I hope that’s fixed before rollout!

    • Thanks, we have a fix in for this issue. The descriptions will show up on the cemetery page.

  11. Name searches on the map page don’t appear to include Maiden Name; both Given and Middle names are searched and hi-lighted.

  13. I checked the v2 for St.Thomas cemetery #163415 and the cemetery description was not in it.

    • Thanks, we have a fix in for this issue. The descriptions will show up on the cemetery page.

  16. I think the GPS will be helpful to see who is buried along side whom. Sometimes this is helpful to see family ties. Good job

  17. Very positive addition – enjoy every aspect of it! Way to go guys and gals – big improvement

  18. I’ve been playing with the Beta version for a while – it’s really a great improvement! Thanks so much for your hard work!

  19. I spend a lot of time adding the bios to the main cemetery page. This takes a lot of work and research. It is hardly visible on the new version where it is placed. I think this should be above the recently added memorials, which could be much smaller. Or change spots between the bio and recently added.

  20. Cemetery # 87674, I know this cemetery like the back of my hand. You have GPS location of Moses Allard in the wrong location, that location isn’t even close to where his stone is. You have 3 Koth graves totally outside the cemetery in the buildings beloning to Daigle Brothers.There are other graves shown on the Daigle property.

    • Hi, it’s wonderful that you know this cemetery so well! You can update the GPS location by going to the memorial on the site and selecting Suggest Edits. Then you can move the pin to the correct location and Save Changes to send the update to the manager. You can also instead use the mobile app and update the location by going to the memorial in the app, standing at the location of the grave, and pinning the GPS location.

  21. I think that the so-called “improved Map page” is still inadequate. For example, compare the v2 map image for the WA State Veterans Cemetery (Cemetery ID 2270292) with that on Maps dot Google dot Com. The Findagrave image is fuzzy and useless — https://www.findagrave.com/v2/cemetery/2270292/washington-state-veterans-cemetery/map#S%7C%5B%5B-117.71481701593237%2C47.588881329113576%5D%2C%5B-117.71139747824301%2C47.59017413002189%5D%5D%7C%7C . The Google Maps image has much higher resolution and is useful — https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5896685,-117.713297,159m/data=!3m1!1e3

    • That’s because Findagrave uses OpenStreetMap due to costs, so it’s different satellite images than what google uses. Many of their images aren’t as good as googles.

  23. I appreciate that you are working on improvements. I am not fond of the cemetery photo being mostly covered up – nor the description so far down on the page.

  24. I am not sure that the closest cemeteries listed are really the closest. For St. Andrews in St. Mary’s County MD, I think the closest cemetery (by direct line is St. Aloysius but it isn’t on the list. Also if the photo on the cemetery is a sign, the new version the sign is unreadable- the photo of the sign needs to be a secondary photo

  25. Sorry but I like the look of the old way better. The “new and improved” version is not appealing nor easier to find things on.

  28. This is awesome! I love the layout, the new information, and the flexibility. Thank you for all your hard work!

  30. I do not use GPS, I use a camera and have no intention of changing as I like to check and adit photo’s before I post, so can I continue to do this or is my time done on this site?

    • All contributions are welcome! We appreciate your help photographing headstones and so will generations to come. Thank you!

    • I do the same and I’m not bothering with any GPS devices to document every photo when I’m doing 100-200 a day.

  31. I was just curious about the possibility of adding an option for a Burial Date (or similar)?

    Something that’s only displayed when the option is selected and populated.

    I hope this isn’t a redundant question that was asked before.

    ~Brian

  32. HI, the new front page is good and I like the map option, is it possible to edit the location of the ‘pink dots’ (drag and drop) as some are obviously out of position (we have many trees etc in the graveyard) and be able to relocate them to more nearly their correct position particularly relative to other memorials.
    Also what is the easiest way of forcing a GPS update via the app?

    • Thanks for your message. We are looking into some new options for editing GPS, but today, you can go to the “Suggest Edits” page for a memorial and use the “Pin On Map” options in the “Burial Coordinates” section to move that pin around.

  34. When someone takes one of my memorials why can I not see who took it. See I can see if I was closer related then the person that took it. We should at less get a email.

    • The Created By or Maintained By line at the bottom of the memorial will tell you who claimed the memorial and their relationship to the subject of the memorial.
      For example:
      Maintained by: Samuel Baker • RELATIVE · FIRST COUSIN
      or
      Created by: Samuel Baker • RELATIVE · FIRST COUSIN

      • I have over ten thousands memorials that I have added there is no way I will no which one that someone else has taken ownership of without some can of information being sent to me.

  35. Memorials which are subject to the new “Recently Deceased” controls appear to limit the Save To — “Virtual Cemeteries” list to the first 20 items. Memorials for others allow many more virtual cemetery items.

  36. Many of the cemeteries in New England, and many in Europe, are very old. Some havent had burials in over 25, 50, 100, 150 years even. So seeing very prominently on the main page the “recently added” can be a little misleading. I’m seeing some “recently added” from 2014. To me recently added would be 30 days, maybe a year. Would it be possible to set what “recently added” is?

  37. Several older or smaller cemeteries don’t have a GPS location. Would it be possible to prominently flag those to encourage the submission of cemetery coordinates.

  38. That’s a start.
    Now when are we going to get a cemetery edit system, to be able to more easily suggest edits to the cemetery instead of having to constantly post a small handful of edits to the cemetery corrections forum every day? I’m mainly interested in an easier way to add GPS to the cemetery itself, not the individual memorials. Been waiting on this for years.

    • Hi Frankz, we’ll keep working toward a cemetery edit page. This was one of the first steps.

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