How to Find a Grave by Name for Free: Every Free Grave Finder, Step by Step

Type a name into a grave finder and you may get a headstone photo and plot number in ten seconds — or nothing at all, even though the person is buried in a well-kept cemetery three miles away. The difference usually comes down to which tool you searched and how you typed the name. Each free grave finder was built by different volunteers or agencies, covers different cemeteries, and fails in different ways. This guide walks through each one: what it holds, how to search it properly, and where its blind spots are. For the broader set of methods (death certificates, funeral homes, and so on), see our guide to finding out where someone is buried; this article goes deeper on the search tools themselves.

1. Find a Grave: The Biggest Database, Searched the Right Way

Find a Grave holds over 265 million memorials created by volunteers since 1995, and searching is free without an account. Most people type a full name and a birth year, get zero results, and give up. Do this instead:

1. Enter only the last name and a location. Leave the first name blank or use an initial, and set the cemetery location to a state or county. Overly specific searches are the main reason people miss memorials that exist.
2. Use a date range, not an exact year. The Year Died field offers "Exact," "Before," "After," and ±1, 3, 5, 10, or 25 years. Headstones and obituaries disagree about dates often enough that ±5 is a sensible default.
3. Check the name-matching boxes. Find a Grave can include Nickname, Maiden name, Titles, and Similar name spellings. A woman buried under her married name will not appear in a search for her birth surname unless the maiden-name option is on and a volunteer entered it.
4. Add a relative's name. The "Spouse, Parent, Child or Sibling name" field is the fastest way to isolate the right John Smith.
5. Use the filters. Restrict results to memorials with a grave photo, GPS, or plot information, or filter by type: Famous, Veteran, Cenotaph, Monument, and Not buried in a cemetery, which catches cremations and burials at sea recorded with no cemetery.

A good result gives you the cemetery name and location, often a section and plot, a headstone photo, and links to family members' memorials, which is how one found grave turns into a whole family group.

Blind spots. Every memorial is created and edited by a volunteer, not by the cemetery. Dates get transcribed wrong, two memorials get created for one person, and family links are sometimes guesses. "Famous" memorials are a curated category with their own filter; ordinary people's memorials exist only if someone walked that cemetery, so coverage is thin for small rural cemeteries, recent burials, and graves with no stone. Treat a memorial as a lead to confirm, not a document. Two features help when a memorial is incomplete: Request Photo asks local volunteers to photograph the stone (a volunteer claims the request and has 14 days to upload), and Suggest Edits sends corrections to whoever manages the memorial, with an optional note explaining your source.

2. BillionGraves: GPS-Tagged Headstones from an App

BillionGraves describes itself as the largest GPS-linked cemetery database in the world, built entirely by crowdsourcing. The difference from Find a Grave is how records are made: volunteers photograph headstones with the BillionGraves app on iOS or Android, which stamps each image with the coordinates where the phone was standing, and other volunteers transcribe the photos online. Basic name search is free; the premium plans are not needed for a lookup. Search the same way as on Find a Grave: surname, place, and a range of years. A match gives you a map pin, so you can walk straight to the stone in a large cemetery with no office or posted map. Blind spots: it covers a different set of cemeteries from Find a Grave, so always check both, and a photo stays unsearchable by name until a volunteer transcribes it.

3. Interment.net: Whole-Cemetery Transcriptions

Interment.net is a free library of cemetery records that, at this writing, searches just over 14 million burial records across 2,156 cemetery transcriptions. Each transcription is kept as its own stand-alone document listing everyone recorded in that cemetery, rather than being merged into one giant index. Records come from cemetery offices, churches, government agencies, and genealogists, so many entries are drawn from interment registers rather than headstones, which means unmarked burials can appear here that never show up in a photo-based database. Browse by country, state, and cemetery, or search by surname, given name, year, and place. Blind spots: 2,156 cemeteries is a small fraction of the country, so check it when you already suspect a county or cemetery, and remember each transcription is a snapshot that stops at the date it was compiled.

4. The VA Nationwide Gravesite Locator for Veterans

If the person served in the U.S. armed forces, search the Department of Veterans Affairs Nationwide Gravesite Locator. It covers burials in VA national cemeteries, state veterans cemeteries, and other military and Department of the Interior cemeteries, and, critically, veterans in private cemeteries whose graves were marked with a government headstone: the VA added 1.9 million such records in 2005, covering graves marked since 1997, and keeps adding more.

The form requires a last name, with "exact match" or "begins with" options (use "begins with" for variable spellings), plus optional first and middle names and month/year of birth and death. Results give the cemetery name and address and usually the section and site number. Blind spots: a veteran in a private cemetery with a family-purchased stone, or a government marker issued before 1997, will usually not be listed, so an empty result does not rule out military service. For World War service members buried overseas, the American Battle Monuments Commission at abmc.gov keeps a separate searchable database.

5. FamilySearch: Free Indexes Plus the Records Behind Them

FamilySearch, run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is free with a free account and is the best place to search several grave finders at once. Its historical-records search includes a Find a Grave Index of more than 274 million entries and a BillionGraves Index of more than 31 million, alongside digitized church burial registers, county death registers, and funeral-home books from many states. Create an account, open Search → Records, enter the name with a place and a death-year range, and work through the collection names on the left. When a hit comes from the Find a Grave or BillionGraves index, click through to the original site for the photo and family links; FamilySearch itself notes that photographs and biographies live on findagrave.com. Blind spots: the indexes lag the live sites, so very new memorials may be missing, and indexing adds its own transcription errors on top of the volunteers' originals.

6. State and County Cemetery Databases

Many state historical commissions and genealogical societies keep free cemetery databases the national tools do not include. Most are cemetery locators (where every known cemetery is, including abandoned and relocated ones) rather than name indexes, which is exactly what you need once an obituary names a cemetery nobody can find today. Examples:

• Illinois: the Illinois State Genealogical Society's Illinois Cemetery Location Project holds almost 15,000 records locating cemeteries by GPS, county, section, township, and range, with driving directions and a note on whether the cemetery's records have been published. Several counties are still incomplete.
• Texas: the Texas Historical Commission's Texas Historic Sites Atlas has a dedicated Cemetery Search among its 300,000-plus site records, with map locations and Historic Texas Cemetery designation details.
• Ohio: the Ohio Genealogical Society's Ohio Cemetery Search looks up cemeteries by partial name, county, and township; results show location data but no burials.
• Iowa: the volunteer Iowa Gravestone Photo Project, launched in 2003, is a true name index with more than 1.3 million gravestone photos searchable by name, county, or statewide.
• Kentucky: the Kentucky Historical Society's Cemeteries in Kentucky database lists registered cemeteries by county with name and location, continuing a registry the state attorney general's office began in 2000.
• Oregon: the Oregon Commission on Historic Cemeteries publishes a statewide list of historic cemeteries by county through the state parks department's Historic Cemeteries Program.

Not every state has one; the Wisconsin Historical Society, for example, holds thousands of cemetery transcriptions and sexton's books in its library but has you search its catalog by cemetery or church name rather than by person. Below the state level, volunteer USGenWeb county pages host decades of typed-up cemetery readings, and county genealogical societies often sell or post indexes to every cemetery in the county. Find the right society in our directory of historical societies by state.

7. Free Newspaper Archives: Let the Obituary Name the Cemetery

When no database has the grave, the obituary usually does. A typical obituary ends with "burial in Riverside Cemetery" or "interment at St. Mary's," and also names the funeral home, which keeps its own records. The Library of Congress's Chronicling America offers free full-text search of digitized newspapers from every state, from the 1700s through 1963. Search the surname with the town name, restrict to the state and a few years around the death, and read hits in the page viewer, because OCR mangles old type and the notice may sit in a column headed "Deaths" rather than "Obituary." Many public libraries also give cardholders free remote access to commercial newspaper archives, and papers that were never digitized exist on microfilm at the local library, where staff will often check a date range for you. Our guide to free historical newspaper archives lists the best free collections state by state.

8. Church Burial Registers

For deaths before your state required death certificates, the parish register is often the only written record of a burial. Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, Reformed, and many other congregations kept burial books listing the dates of death and burial, age, and sometimes the cemetery or plot. Many are digitized on FamilySearch (search the catalog by place, then look under "Church records"); the rest sit with the parish or, if it closed, the diocese or denominational archive. Entries are handwritten, often in Latin, German, or an older script; our guide on how to read old handwriting will help you decipher them.

9. When to Call the Cemetery Office or County Clerk

Databases are copies; the cemetery's own interment register is the original. Call the office when you know or suspect the cemetery but cannot find the plot, when a stone was never placed, or to confirm a database entry before driving out. Active cemeteries record every burial by name, date, and lot, usually with the purchaser's name, and will typically check a name for free. Municipal cemeteries are often run by the town clerk or parks department, church cemeteries by the parish office; for closed cemeteries, sexton's books and plot maps commonly ended up with the town clerk, the county historical society, or the state archives. County clerks and health departments are a second stop: many counties required burial permits and kept death registers before statewide registration, and those registers name the place of burial. Look in the county where the person died, not where they lived.

Common-Name Problems: Finding the Right John Smith

A common name produces hundreds of hits, and the right person is rarely the first. Work from the outside in. Fix the place first: most people are buried within a few miles of where they died, so restrict the search to the county and sort by cemetery. Add the spouse: couples bought adjoining lots, so a memorial linked to the correct spouse is almost certainly right, and Find a Grave's relative-name field searches that link directly. Use dates as a filter, not a key: a ±5-year death range survives a mis-transcribed stone, and a birth year separates father from son. Finally, read the stone itself; a middle initial, a fraternal emblem, or a military marker will match other things you know. If two memorials in one cemetery look like the same person, one is probably a duplicate; read both, because each volunteer may have recorded a different detail.

No Record Found: What Next

An empty search means one of four things: the name is spelled differently in the record, the grave is unmarked or unphotographed, the person was cremated, or the cemetery has not been covered by any volunteer. Run the checklist in order:

1. Re-search with less. Surname only, "similar spellings" on, state only, no dates. Then try an initial, a phonetic spelling, and (for women) the maiden name and any later married name.
2. Switch tools. A grave missing from Find a Grave may be in BillionGraves, Interment.net, FamilySearch's church registers, or a state database.
3. Get the obituary or death record. Either normally names the cemetery and the funeral home; our broader guide covers ordering a death certificate.
4. Call the cemetery. The office register settles it, including unmarked graves and cremated remains placed in a niche or scattering garden.
5. Ask the local society. County historical and genealogical societies hold transcriptions of cemeteries since plowed under, flooded, or moved, and many do name lookups for free or a few dollars. Find yours in our directory.

Tips That Save Time

• Search every tool with the same bad spelling. If a surname was recorded as "Schmitt" on a census, try that form on every grave finder, not just the one you know is correct.
• Note the memorial ID. Find a Grave and BillionGraves records have permanent ID numbers; copy them so you can cite the source and return to it later.
• Request a photo before you travel. A fulfilled request confirms the stone exists and shows its condition, which can save a wasted trip.
• Correct what you find. Suggesting an edit on a wrong date or a missing maiden name helps the next searcher.
• Check the stone against the register. Carved dates were sometimes ordered years later from memory; the interment book, written at the time, wins a conflict.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Find a Grave completely free to search?

Yes. Searching memorials and viewing headstone photos require no account and cost nothing. Creating memorials, requesting photos, and suggesting edits also cost nothing but require a free account. There is no paid tier required for lookups.

What is the best free grave finder?

Find a Grave has the most memorials by far, so it is the right first search. But it is a volunteer project with uneven coverage, so the best approach is to run the same name through BillionGraves, FamilySearch, and Interment.net as well, and to use the VA Nationwide Gravesite Locator for anyone who served in the military.

Why can't I find a grave that I know exists?

Usually because the name in the record differs from what you typed: a maiden name, nickname, initial, or misspelling. Search with only the surname and a state, turn on similar-spellings and maiden-name options, and widen the death year to a range. If that fails, the grave may simply never have been photographed or transcribed, in which case the cemetery office is the surest source.

How do I find a headstone with only a name and a state?

Start on Find a Grave with the last name, the state as the cemetery location, and no dates, then sort by cemetery to see where the surname clusters. Repeat on FamilySearch, which searches the Find a Grave and BillionGraves indexes together with death and church records. A hit in a county death register or an obituary will then narrow the search to one cemetery.

Does a grave finder show unmarked graves?

Photo-based databases like Find a Grave and BillionGraves rarely do, because volunteers record what they can see. Interment.net and FamilySearch sometimes do, since many of their records come from cemetery registers rather than stones. For a confirmed unmarked burial, ask the cemetery office to check its interment book and plot map.