Using Find A Grave and BillionGraves for Genealogy Research
Two crowdsourced platforms hold memorial records for more than 270 million individuals between them — and for genealogists hunting a death date, a maiden name, or a cemetery location, that depth changes the game. Find A Grave and BillionGraves are not replacements for official vital records, but they open doors that county courthouses and death certificates sometimes cannot.
Definition and scope
Find A Grave, launched in 1995 and acquired by Ancestry.com in 2013, is a volunteer-maintained online database of cemetery memorials. Contributors photograph headstones, transcribe inscriptions, upload obituaries, and link family members together within the platform. As of 2024, Find A Grave hosts more than 230 million memorial records across cemeteries in over 200 countries (Find A Grave, Ancestry.com).
BillionGraves, founded in 2010, pursues a narrower and more structured mission: GPS-tagged headstone photographs paired with transcriptions, indexed so that every record carries precise geographic coordinates. The platform emphasizes accuracy through a two-step process — photograph first, transcribe second — and has indexed more than 60 million records (BillionGraves). The GPS component is not incidental. For researchers trying to locate a physical grave in a large rural cemetery without clear section markers, a coordinate is worth considerably more than a cemetery name.
Both platforms sit comfortably within the broader ecosystem of online genealogy databases, but their volunteer-crowdsourced architecture distinguishes them from commercial record repositories and government archives.
How it works
The mechanics differ enough to matter when choosing which platform to search first.
Find A Grave operates through a memorial system. Each deceased individual gets a memorial page that can include:
- Full name and any name variants noted on the stone
- Birth and death dates (and locations, when known)
- Photographs of the headstone, graveside flowers, and the surrounding plot
- Linked spouse, parent, sibling, and child memorials
- Transcribed obituaries, bio text, and uploaded documents
- Flower and candle tributes from living relatives
Volunteers — called "contributors" — create and manage memorials. A contributor who photographs a headstone in a cemetery they visited owns that memorial unless the family claims it. Families can request memorial transfer through a formal process. This ownership structure occasionally creates friction when a living relative wants to update or correct information.
BillionGraves routes every record through a mobile app. A volunteer opens the app, photographs a headstone, and the app automatically stamps the image with GPS coordinates. A second volunteer then transcribes the photographed stone using the platform's web interface. The separation of photography and transcription reduces single-point errors and creates an auditable chain — the photograph exists independently of the transcription, so discrepancies can be checked against the original image.
For researchers following the genealogical proof standard, that photograph-to-transcription chain has real evidentiary value. A transcription alone is a derivative source. A photographed stone with GPS confirmation, cross-referenced against the transcription, approaches the reliability of a direct source record.
Common scenarios
The platforms prove most useful in four specific research situations:
Confirming a death year when vital records are missing. Before statewide death registration was mandatory — most US states did not require it until between 1900 and 1930 — cemetery records and headstones are often the only surviving death documentation. A stone inscription noting birth in 1847 and death in 1891 provides a hard date that no other surviving record may offer for that individual.
Locating where a family cluster is buried. Cemetery plots often reveal three-generation family geography in a single photograph. A headstone photograph showing parents, grandparents, and siblings buried in adjacent rows tells a story about migration patterns that complements US census records and vital records.
Identifying maiden names. Many 19th-century headstones inscribed married women with both names — "Mary (Hoffmeister) Wagner, 1851–1904" — a convention that fell away through the 20th century. These inscriptions preserve maiden names that death certificates frequently omit.
Breaking through brick walls in under-documented communities. For African American genealogy research in the post-Reconstruction South, church cemeteries documented on BillionGraves and Find A Grave sometimes hold the only surviving records of individuals who appear in no surviving official register. Cemetery associations in rural counties maintained burial logs when county governments did not.
Decision boundaries
Neither platform is a primary source, and both carry data quality limitations that disciplined researchers account for in citing genealogical sources.
When Find A Grave is the better first stop: Research involving cemeteries in English-speaking countries, especially the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where volunteer coverage is densest. Find A Grave's linked family network also makes it easier to identify collateral relatives — an aunt's memorial page may link back to the grandparents whose records are missing.
When BillionGraves is the better first stop: Research requiring GPS precision, international cemeteries where Find A Grave coverage is thin, or cases where photograph-to-transcription verification matters for source documentation. BillionGraves also integrates directly with FamilySearch, making it a natural companion for researchers already working within the FamilySearch ecosystem.
When to use neither as a final answer: Always. Both platforms rely on volunteer transcription, which introduces spelling errors, date transpositions, and occasional invented information. A headstone itself can carry errors — parents misremembered birth years, and stonecutters made mistakes. Cross-referencing against primary vs. secondary sources remains mandatory before treating any memorial record as confirmed genealogical fact.
The platforms are tools for discovery, not verification. Finding an ancestor on Find A Grave is the beginning of a research thread, not the end of one. Anyone building a serious family tree — the kind that holds up to scrutiny — should treat these platforms as the genealogy research methods starting point they are, and then follow the evidence forward from there. The genealogyauthority.com home resource network covers those next steps in detail.