At what sites can I find a persons cemetery lot?

Question:

At what sites can I find a persons cemetery lot?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Good question. I would probably begin at ancestry.com

This is their suggestion:

Locating Cemeteries Online

The best starting point in your online cemetery research may be the U.S. Geologic Survey's Geographic Name Information System (GNIS) site at geonames.usgs.gov/. From here, you may proceed to the query page at geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnis/web... and enter information to help you locate specific cemeteries in a given area. (Please note that the URL shown contains underscore characters ( _ ) and not spaces in the name.) Simply use the pull-down menu choices to choose state or territory, and to choose Feature Type "cemetery"—and then narrow your selection to a specific county. I located 141 cemeteries in Cook County, Illinois, in this way. The query will provide you with the latitude and longitude of the cemetery, as well as a reference to a USGS map. Click on the cemetery name and another screen. Take some time to investigate the various mapping options. Most helpful, though, is the link labeled "Show Feature Location" which takes you to the U.S. Census Bureau's Tiger Map Server's map of the area in question. The cemetery you want will be indicated by a large red dot. You can zoom in for a more detailed view of the location.

Interment.net at interment.net is a resource for locating cemeteries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and other countries. While far from complete, it is one place where transcriptions are being placed online and can be one of your starting points.

Cemetery Junction at daddezio.com/cemetery/ boasts more than 31,000 U.S. cemeteries, more than 21,000 family cemeteries, over 2,000 Canadian cemeteries, and over 450 Australian cemeteries listed.

The USGenWeb (www.usgenweb.org) and WorldGenWeb (www.worldgenweb.org) Project sites are a wealth of cemetery materials as well. You should refer to the location in which you believe your ancestors lived to determine if some individual or organization has contributed cemetery information to their site. In addition, the Tombstone Transcription Project at USGenWeb (www.rootsweb.com/~cemetery) is an impressive resource whose goal is to record the tombstone inscriptions of our ancestors now and make them available online before the images and inscriptions are lost to the ravages of time.

Genealogical and historical societies are resources you should never overlook. Society Hall, a Web site developed by Ancestry.com and the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS), is a listing of information about genealogical societies (www.familyhistory.com/society... A society may have compiled extensive information about cemeteries in their area. The Pinellas Genealogy Society, Inc., (www.rootsweb.com/~flpgs), for example, has been actively canvassing and transcribing cemeteries in Pinellas County, Florida, for a number of years. Not only have they published these for sale, they have recently begun putting indexes on their Web site.

GeneaSearch has a collection of cemetery links at geneasearch.com/cemeteries.htm that may be helpful, as well as an e-mail newsletter to which you may subscribe.

Find A Grave, at www.findagrave.com, claims to have 2.8 million records of the famous, infamous, and not famous persons. You can search by name, location, date, claim to fame, and a variety of other criteria. One facility allows you to search for cemeteries throughout the U.S. and to view the names of persons for whom burial information has been submitted by people just like yourself.

As you can see, there are quite a few sites to check. In addition, you can use your favorite search engine and enter the name of the cemetery and the location. Enclose words in quotation marks to make them exact phrases and use a plus sign ( + ) to indicate both are required to be found. For example, I tried to locate information about a cemetery in my hometown:

"woodland cemetery" + "madison, NC"

The search gave me results including obituaries, advertisements, and funeral related information. These may provide pointers to funeral home contacts, churches, and other resources.

Invest some time in researching cemeteries online and, perhaps, in submitting records of your own family members into some of the virtual online cemeteries. You may make connections with some of your own dead relatives online.