Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Find A Grave

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is back again this week with more Saturday Night Genealogy Fun!

Hey genea-searchers, it's SATURDAY NIGHT ... time for more GENEALOGY FUN!!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1)  Go to the Find-a-Grave website (www.findagrave.com) and search for ancestors that you don't know the burial location of.   How far back in time did you have to go to find this person?  Hint #1 - use your ancestor list to help you.  Hint #2 - don't forget to use the last surname for females!

2)  If you think that Find-a-Grave will not have your persons of interest, then check another burial index that might help you.

3)  Tell us about your search - who did you look for, and who was the first ancestor that you found that you did not have a burial location for previously?  Write your own blog post, or make a comment on this post.

Well, unfortunately, I've been using Find A Grave for so long that it would be difficult to find someone for whom I have not already searched and found an entry, or searched and found none.  It would go quite far back!  The other side is that I am at work and not at home, so don't have full access to my data to play along this time.

That said, I fully encourage you to give this a try, as Find A Grave is a great place to find information about ancestors.  Many entries have a copy of the obituary and photographs of the gravestone, but even those that don't usually have at least some interesting information, such as birth and death dates and locations, and the location of the burial, at least the cemetery.  I've gained quite a bit of information about some of my more (physically) distant ancestors this way, since I was unable to travel to the actual gravesites in person.

If you find a entry for one of your ancestors and you don't see a picture of the gravestone, you can request that one be taken, and nearby volunteers will be contacted to let them get an image to post for you.  I am very thankful to a number of kind volunteers who have done this for graves of my ancestors.  I have also taken photos of graves in nearby cemeteries for others who have requested them.