Whether you’re new to family history or have been a genealogist for years, you’ve probably come to value the important information gleaned from cemetery records. These resources often provide a wealth of information about an ancestor, including birth and death dates, full legal name, name of a spouse, name of children, locations lived, and more.
Thankfully, dozens of online tools exist to help researchers find cemetery records pertaining to your family tree. Many of these resources can be accessed for free. We’ve compiled a list below of some of the more useful tools you can use to locate these important records.
Jump to Section
- Why Are Cemetery Records so Important for Genealogy Research?
- BillionGraves
- Find A Grave
- Interment
- JewishGen
- Commonwealth War Graves
- Political Graveyard
- Tombstone Transcription Project
- Historic Graves
- Canadian Headstones
- FamilySearch
Why Are Cemetery Records so Important for Genealogy Research?
Cemetery records are crucial resources for any family historian or genealogist, providing a wealth of valuable information that can help uncover more about lineage and connections. These records help researchers piece together family histories with greater accuracy and depth.
Information You Can Find in Cemetery Records
- Names (including maiden names)
- Birth and death dates (and places)
- Insights into familial relationships, including spouses, children, and sometimes even extended family members
- Familial burial plots or family members buried together, offering clues about social and familial networks
- Info about military service, religion, occupation, or membership in certain organizations
1. BillionGraves

BillionGraves, according to their website, is the world’s largest resource for searchable GPS cemetery data. BillionGraves, which can be accessed on a desktop and through the mobile app, is dedicated to photographing and transcribing information from gravestones in cemeteries around the world.
After downloading the app (available for both iOS and Android), users can take pictures of headstones and upload them to the BillionGraves website. The images are then transcribed by volunteers who are eager to contribute to this growing database.
If you’re searching for an ancestor's grave, BillionGraves also makes it possible to locate any imaged or indexed gravestone on their site, thanks to GPS coordinates and satellite technology.
You can also access the BillionGraves index online at FamilySearch.
Countries included: Worldwide
2. Find a Grave

Similar to BillionGraves, Find a Grave is a free resource dedicated to documenting and preserving headstones from around the world. The website, powered by volunteers, provides GPS information, headstone photos, and biographies—information that is vital to family historians.
Consider becoming a Find a Grave contributor! You can photograph headstones in your local cemetery, help build out the cemetery map online, create cemetery profiles, fulfill photo requests, and transcribe gravestone information. If you are interested in becoming a Find a Grave contributor, check out the page on their website.
Countries included: Worldwide
3. Interment

Interment.net offers free access to a vast collection of memorial inscriptions, cemetery records, and burial registers from 28 countries. These inscriptions often contain valuable information such as names, dates, relationships, and sometimes even personal details.
The advantage of Interment is that almost all of their transcriptions come from local governments and churches, improving the reliability and accuracy of your research. They also have special collections that contain death indexes from mining, airship, train wreck, and ship disasters.
Countries included: Worldwide
4. JewishGen Cemetery Database

JewishGen focuses on providing resources for Jewish genealogy. Their worldwide burial registry has 4.2 million records from 143 countries, all from Jewish cemeteries.
This website is free to search. You can search by name, date, cemetery, and country.
Countries included: Worldwide
5. Commonwealth War Graves

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains 23,000 war cemeteries and memorials for fallen soldiers from World War I and World War II. These cemeteries are the burial places for soldiers from the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and many other Commonwealth countries.
When searching the Commonwealth War Graves database, you can search by soldier's name, burial place, home country, and whether they served in the First or Second World War. They even have a free interactive app, so if you live far away from the cemetery where your soldier is buried, you can see the grave virtually on the app. Their site is completely free to use.
Countries included: United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India
6. Political Graveyard

Searching for gravestone information related to political figures and families from the United States? Political Graveyard is for you! Their online catalog has information on more than 300,000 prominent US political figures and persons.
When researching on this site, you’ll be led to information regarding where these people were buried, dates and locations of birth and death, offices held, organizational affiliations, and causes of death. You can even search by other occupations held. So, if you've ever wondered which politicians have worked in garbage disposal, won Nobel Prizes, or competed in the Olympics, Political Graveyard is the place to look!
Countries included: United States
7. Tombstone Transcription Project

Many old headstones and gravestone inscriptions are fading due to time and harsh weather conditions. In an effort to preserve gravestone information, the Tombstone Transcription Project is geared towards organizing volunteers who work together to transcribe tombstone inscriptions and archive the information so that future generations will be able to access and understand it.
The Tombstone Transcription Project is focused on cemeteries in the US, along with a few cemeteries outside the US that hold US citizens. You can use their website to search for tombstones by state and county, helping you to discover more information about people of interest.
Countries included: United States
8. Historic Graves

Historic Graves, based in Ireland, supports communities in documenting their local cemeteries and recording oral histories at the grassroots level. They provide training and equipment to communities to allow them to document and preserve their cemeteries.
Their site has information from over 900 cemeteries in Ireland and the UK. You can search their database for free to find graves and stories of your Irish ancestors. You can even see stories about cemeteries all over Ireland!
Countries included: Ireland, United Kingdom
9. Canadian Headstones

Canadian Headstones is a registered Canadian charity completely devoted to Canadian graves. Volunteers image and transcribe headstones from all over Canada. They have records for almost 2 million people buried in Canada.
On Canadian Headstones, you can view both the images and transcriptions of every headstone for free.
Countries included: Canada
10. FamilySearch

At FamilySearch, we offer free collections of historical records covering a variety of time periods and regions of the world. On our records search page, you can search all our records at once or type cemetery into the Find a Collection search box to see many of the cemetery records that FamilySearch has to offer.
Our research wiki also has country-specific guides for searching cemetery information:
- United States
- Canada
- United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland)
- Ireland
- Australia
- New Zealand
- South Africa
Learn More about the People in a Cemetery
Have you ever walked through a cemetery or memorial site and wanted to know more about the people buried or remembered there? FamilySearch's most powerful cemetery tools go beyond finding burial records and information on headstones. These tools give rich details about each person in a cemetery that can also be found in the worldwide FamilySearch Tree.
The next time you are visiting a cemetery or memorial site, try using our Cemetery Search to see life events, occupations, pictures, stories, and more about the people memorialized at that location.
Generate a List of Cemeteries to Visit
If you want to learn more about the final resting places of your ancestors but aren't sure where to start, the worldwide FamilySearch Tree can help with that as well. With a free account on FamilySearch, you can keep track of what you know about your ancestors—and find out what others know about them, too. Our Relatives in Cemeteries tool can then generate a list of cemeteries where your relatives are buried, showing you where they are on a global map.
What other resources do you use to aid your cemetery and obituary research? Comment down below!