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:
- The search box moved to the top of the page
- The contribution box and ring chart
- Tabs for viewing Photos and the improved Map page
- Options for viewing lists other than Recently added
- 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.