HEAVY WEIGHTS
Finding a relative’s final resting place is one of a genealogist’s top priorities. Death and burial data help identify ancestors and sometimes other relatives buried near-by. Records relating to their deaths may lead to new stories about their lives, and you may even hope to visit in person to pay your respects.
Fortunately, several free websites make it easier to locate ancestral burials. Two of these “gravestone giants” may already be familiar to you: BillionGraves <www.billiongraves.com> and Find a Grave <www.findagrave.com>. But there’s a third you should know about, too: Interment.net <www.interment.net>.
All three sites are free—and all three are different. Some of their gravesite content overlaps, but some of it is unique. But you won’t know which will help you the most with any given grave search until you try them. This head-to-head comparison (or headstone-to-headstone, as the case may be) will prepare you to dig into each one until you unearth just the ancestral information you need.
BILLIONGRAVES
BillionGraves www.billiongraves.comhas a bold goal: to digitally preserve at least a billion gravestones. To date, volunteers have uploaded over 40 million GPS-tagged headstone images from over half a million cemeteries in 130 countries. Though BillionGraves does offer a paid Plus membership with extra tools <www.billiongraves. com/bgplus>, most features are free.
The site hosts an additional 140 million burial-related records from municipalities, churches, and so on—and more are coming. Records include death certificates and obituaries.
What’s on BillionGraves
The core record of BillionGraves is the GPS-tagged headstone, imaged and uploaded by volunteers via the free BillionGraves mobile app <> (available from the App Store and Google Play). The app works in 25 languages and supports
