Finding Cemeteries

Finding Cemeteries

Cemetery Finding Tools

Even if you are not a full on genealogist or you are an occasional family historian you have probably walked a cemetery mostly found on Find A Grave or Billion Graves. However, if you cannot find the cemetery you are looking for on these sites, where can you go to locate a lost cemetery? While there is no guarantee any website may have a small hidden family cemetery, it is good to be able to look at other places to see if it happens to be the lucky place where you hit a jackpot.

Find A Grave and Billion Graves are great, and we use them a lot. Here are some other options that might help as well.

Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)

One such site where you may find latitudes and longitudes for cemeteries (plus much more) is the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). You will need to know the name of the cemetery and do a search for it. If it is in the database it will show you the longitude and latitude of the location and you can just pop that into your GPS. But beware while this is another choice for finding the cemetery you are looking for, it still does not include all cemeteries. Yet, more get added so you can add this to your arsenal of places to go back to to look at a later time.

POI Factory

For the next website you will need a GPS. Most people have cell phones with a GPS app of some sort. The POI Factory (Points of Interest) service will provide you with exact geographic coordinates and has over one million locations and is updated weekly. For this database you will need to take a few more steps to elevate to many locations. A suggestion is start with typing in the cemetery, once they all pop up, narrow your search. If you don’t know the name of the cemetery, type in a town that is close to where you know or expect it is located. The more detail you can give the fewer results you have to go through. The bonus to POI Factory is it makes a file containing the names and locations of the cemeteries you found and you can download to your GPS device.

Expanding Toolbox

While we live in a great time with so many genealogy resources at our fingertips, we still need to understand that unfortunately not everything is always super easy. There are no guarantees that any of the four sites mentioned will have what you are looking for. Armed with the knowledge of all the different websites you can use, your odds of finding what you are looking for are getting better.

We can help

If you need any help finding your ancestors in records or in cemeteries, let us know.

Tracy Hall

Tracy is an owner, a genealogy researcher, and author. She has a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois and a master's degree from Grand Canyon University. She has done genealogical research in the U.S., England, and Ireland. She has been actively researching family histories for over 20 years. She loves working with clients, breaking down brick walls, seeing the places where hers and your ancestors lived, learning about their jobs and work, and researching immigration and migration patterns. She is the Holder of the Tree in several of her family lines and has been for decades.