Type of site Online database Owner Ancestry.com Website www.findagrave.com | Available in English Editor Jim Tipton Alexa rank 4,217 (November 2016) | |
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Find a Grave is a website that allows the public to search and add to an online database of cemetery records. It is owned by Ancestry.com, the world's largest for-profit genealogy company.
Contents
History
The site was created in 1995 by Salt Lake City resident Jim Tipton to support his hobby of visiting the burial sites of celebrities. He later added an online forum. Find a Grave was launched as a commercial entity in 1998, first as a trade name and then incorporated in 2000.
The site later expanded to include graves of non-celebrities, in order to allow online visitors to pay respect to their deceased relatives or friends.
In 2013, Tipton sold Find a Grave to Ancestry.com, saying that the geneaology company had "been linking and driving traffic to the site for several years. Burial information is a wonderful source for people researching their family history." In a September 30, 2013, press release, Ancetry.com officials said they would "launch a new mobile app, improve customer support, [and] introduce an enhanced edit system for submitting updates to memorials, foreign-language support, and other site improvements."
As of September 2016, Find a Grave contained over 152 million burial records and 75 million photos.
Content and features
The website contains listings of cemeteries and graves from around the world. American cemeteries are organized by state and county, and many cemetery records contain Google Maps (with GPS coordinates supplied by contributors) and photographs of the cemeteries and gravesites. Individual grave records may contain dates and places of birth and death, biographical information, cemetery and plot information, photographs (grave marker, the individual, etc.), and contributor information.
Interment listings are added by individuals, genealogical societies, and other institutions such as the International Wargraves Photography Project.
Contributors must register as members to submit listings, called memorials, on the site. The submitter becomes the manager of the listing but may transfer management. Only the current manager of a listing may edit it, although any member may use the site's features to send correction requests to the listing's manager. Managers may add links to other listings of deceased spouses, parents, and siblings for genealogical purposes.
Any member may also add photographs and notations to individual listings; notations may include images of flowers, flags, religious or other symbols, and often include a message of sympathy or condolence. Members may post requests for photos of a specific grave; these requests will be automatically sent to other members who have registered their location as being near that grave.
Find a Grave also maintains lists of memorials of famous persons by their "claim to fame", such as Medal of Honor recipients, religious figures, and educators. Find a Grave exercises editorial control over these listings.