How to find where someone is buried
Trying to find where someone is buried? Wherever they rest, the search tends to run the same way, and most people find their answer without leaving home. Start with the free online indexes, check the death record or an obituary for the name of the cemetery, and then contact the cemetery itself, which holds the authoritative records. This guide walks each step in order. Take your time — these searches reward patience, and the trail is often shorter than it looks.
Start with the free online indexes
Volunteers have spent years photographing and transcribing graves, and their work is free to search. This is the fastest first move for most searches:
- Find a Grave — the largest gravesite index, free to search with no account required. Volunteers photograph and transcribe headstones, so a great many graves are already here with a photo and a location.
- FamilySearch — free, run by a nonprofit, with large cemetery collections and links out to headstone photos. Its free cemetery-research guide is a good map of where to look next.
- BillionGraves — GPS-tagged headstone photos, strongest where volunteers have walked a particular cemetery end to end.
Try a name in all three; each covers different ground. Remember these are indexes, not the official record — a memorial page is a wonderful lead, but the cemetery is still where the authoritative plot and interment records live.
Check the death record and the obituary
If the indexes come up short, the death record usually names the place of burial. A death certificate typically lists the cemetery or place of disposition, which points you straight to the right grounds. Death certificates are restricted records in most states — usually only eligible family members can order one — but you request them through the state or county vital-records office where the death occurred.
An obituary is often quicker and more open: it commonly names the cemetery, the funeral home, and surviving family. Newspaper archives, library databases, and funeral-home websites are all worth a search.
Contact the cemetery directly
Once you know the cemetery, contact it. Whoever runs it — a private company, a church, a town, or a small cemetery district — holds the plot map and the burial ledger, which is the authoritative record of who is buried where and who holds the plot. A rural cemetery is frequently run by a small district with its own board and clerk; a call or an email to that office can confirm a burial, and often locate the exact grave, faster than it sounds. If a cemetery has set up a public online burial search, use it; if it hasn’t, you’ll reach a real person, which is often the shortest path of all.
If the person was a veteran
For anyone who served, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs runs a free national search. The Nationwide Gravesite Locator, from the VA’s National Cemetery Administration, lets you look up burial locations for veterans and their family members in VA national cemeteries, state veterans cemeteries, and other military cemeteries — and for veterans buried in private cemeteries when the grave has a government-furnished marker (those records generally begin in 1997). If the locator can’t find someone, the National Cemetery Administration accepts burial-location requests by mail; a reply typically takes about four weeks.
When nothing turns up
Some searches go quiet for a while, and that’s normal. A few things to try when the usual routes come up empty:
- Widen the spelling. Old records vary — try nicknames, maiden names, and alternate spellings, and search by first name and dates alone.
- Ask a local historical or genealogical society. For older burials, county historical societies and libraries often hold transcribed cemetery records, old plat maps, and obituary files that no office kept.
- Check nearby cemeteries. People were often buried where family already lay, or in the next town over. Search the surrounding area, not just the town of death.
- Consider that the grave may be unmarked. Not every burial has a stone, and not every stone made it into an index. The cemetery’s own ledger may still have the record even when no photo exists.
Patience and a second pass a few weeks later solve a surprising number of searches.
Looking in Colorado?
If your search is in Colorado, we’ve mapped the state’s cemetery districts and written a deeper guide to the local, county, and state records paths — see how to find burial records in Colorado.