Cemeteries can be a good source of birth and death dates. A tombstone at a cemetery grave may list the day, month and year of birth and death of an individual. The grave may also be in a family plot that contains graves and tombstones for other family members as well.
The cemetery manager, church or other associated managerial organization might maintain burial records for the cemetery. Cemetery records for example may be maintained at a parish rectory if a cemetery is associated with a parish.
The cemetery manager will probably have more information than is on the tombstones. In addition to the birth and death dates the manager's records may contain information about the burial services and other family members including the deceased's spouse and/or parents.
You can visit a cemetery and go to grave sites to see what information is contained on a tombstone. You can also call, write or visit the cemetery manager to find out where the records are and who maintains the cemetery records.
You can visit a local genealogical society, library or historical society and in many cases find cemetery information. They may have photos of tombstones and/or transcriptions of tombstone information.
In addition there are many volunteers throughout the world who have and continue to provide tombstone photos and transcriptions of tombstones - like those participating in the USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project. Since most of the currently, available information is online the web is a good place to look for cemetery information.
You can use you favorite search engines to try to find cemetery information online and you can also visit local genealogy websites to find out what information they have on cemeteries and tombstones in their particular areas.
You can also visit websites like the USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project that provides transcribed tombstone inscription information from US, Military and Foreign cemeteries.
When you undertake a cemetery search on some websites the search results may provide additional information from the site's other databases as well. For example, in our Search using the Political Graveyard we didn't find any cemetery information for John Browne but we did discover other important information about him.
If you can't find any cemetery records try the funeral home's website. More and more funeral homes publish obituaries and other information about deceased individuals on their websites.
On these sites you might find some cemetery records as well as photos of the deceased, comments in the deceased's guestbook, life stories, a life timeline and more.
You can usually find some cemetery information in obituaries. See our Search Tips for Finding Obituary Information.