Cemeteries: Difference between revisions

{{Cemetery-stub}}  

Cemeteries are regarded as the location where people are buried after they die. They are often known by various terms such as graveyards, burying grounds, burial grounds, burial plots, 'churchyards', and several other terms. Some of the terms are often used to define smaller cemeteries, such as those that may be adjacent to a church, hence the term 'churchyard' in a few cases for example, with smaller cemeteries, while others apply to all.  

A cemetery may be operated by a municipality, or it may be operated by a church or religion, a funeral home or other private company, or a fraternal order. Depending on availability of suitable land, it may be quite small, or it may be very large. Some burial plots may contain only one or several graves, while a few very large ones may have over a million burials.  

== Finding Cemeteries  ==

 

 

=== Websites for Cemetery Research  ===

 

 

==== Individual Cemetery Websites  ====

 

Some cemeteries will maintain a website which will often list operating hours, and some will post burial lists online on those sites. Be sure to see if the cemetery you want to find a burial has a website, often this can be found via a search engine.

 

 

[http://www.findagrave.com Find A Grave] is probably the best known aggregaor site for cemetery data. Photos and other information are gathered by site visitors and users and submitted to it. They are then made searchable, and you can search for a burial globally on the site. Coverage depends on the cemetery and the interest in it. May not contain the more recent headstones in some cases.  

 

==== Interment.net  ====

 

[http://www.interment.net Interment.net] is a site where transcriptions of headstones are gathered and placed online. There are no photos, but you can often find listings of burials that can be nearly complete for older or very small cemeteries.  

 

[http://www.billiongraves.com BillionGraves] is a newer site that allows users to download an app for their iPhone or Android device (for Android users, the website will indicate which Android devices do NOT work with their app), then go out to a cemetery and take pictures of the headstones. The app tags the photos with the GPS location, thus it effectively maps the cemetery, which makes it easy to find the location on the web or on the smartphone app. This site is very new, so coverage is not to the level of Find A Grave or Interment.net, but thousands of headstones are photographed and uploaded every week to the site.

==== Names in Stone ====

[http://www.namesinstone.com Names in Stone] is another site that uses GPS technology to map cemeteries. An additional feature is that the site partners with cemeteries to add new headstone photos to the site on a regular basis since often a cemetery is still having burials take place. There are other mapping features on the site too.

==== Waymarking.com Worldwide Cemeteries  ====

[http://www.waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=205c956b-25b3-47fe-9fb1-2c758098e5cb&st=2 Waymarking.com Worldwide Cemeteries] is a new project to geolocate any cemetery or burial place anywhere in the world and 'waymark' it so that anyone can find it should they go to the location. Some locations will have photos, all will have GPS coordinates although in a few cases that can be somewhat off so verify what you find with Google Maps, Bing Maps, or other searchable mapping site. No actual data is here, only the geolocation data and occasionally some other information about the cemetery.