Find A Grave

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Findagrave.com


URL	www.findagrave.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Online database
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	English
Owner	Jim Tipton
Created by	Jim Tipton
Launched	1995
Current status	Active

Find A Grave is a website providing access and input to an online database of cemetery records.

1 History
2 Content and features
3 Find A Grave community
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

History

According to the founder, Jim Tipton,^[1] the website was developed in 1995 to address the lack of any existing site that catered to his hobby of visiting the graves of famous people.

Initially the site listed only celebrities, but by 2000 Tipton opened the site to non-famous memorials^{[citation needed]}

After some time, an online forum was created on the site.^[2]

As of November 2008, the site claims to host 27 million records^[3]

Content and features

The site's FAQ states that the site strives for a comprehensive listing of the burial places of everyone in the world.^[4]

The website contains listings of cemeteries and graves from all 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 the U.S. Geological Survey) and photographs of the cemeteries. Individual grave records contain some or all of the following data fields: dates and places of birth and death, biographical information, cemetery and plot information, photographs (grave marker, the individual, etc.), and contributor information.

Members are allowed to place on-line memorials for relatives and friends for no cost. Users receive editing privileges over the memorials. Members may also request photos of graves which Find A Grave volunteers can fulfill.

Find A Grave community

The members of Find A Grave have formed a community over the years of the site's existence. The Find A Grave Forums is a message board for contributors to the main website and persons who are interested in genealogy or cemeteries. Some members engage in a hobby known as "Tombstone Tourism" (the practice of visiting cemeteries purely for personal enjoyment)^[5], which the people of the site often refer to as "graving".