Find a Grave: How to Search by Name for Free

Find a Grave is completely free to search — no account, no subscription, no trial. Go to findagrave.com, type the last name (first name optional), add a state if you know one, and you're looking at headstone photos, birth and death dates, and often whole family plots within seconds. The site holds well over 200 million volunteer-created memorials worldwide, which makes it one of the fastest free lookups in all of genealogy.

This guide covers how the search actually works, the filters that rescue a failed search, what a memorial page can (and can't) prove, and how to request a free headstone photo from a local volunteer. When a memorial links you to unfamiliar relatives — "daughter of," "spouse of," a plot full of shared surnames — the free family relationship calculator on our homepage translates each connection into the exact relationship term.

What Find a Grave is (and who builds it)

Find a Grave started in 1995 as a hobby site and has grown into the world's largest grave database — hundreds of millions of memorials across hundreds of thousands of cemeteries. Ancestry has owned it since 2013, but searching and viewing remain free for everyone. The content comes from volunteers: people who walk cemeteries photographing headstones, transcribe burial registers, and build memorial pages with dates, photos, and family links.

That volunteer origin matters for how you use it. Coverage is superb in some counties and thin in others, and the genealogical details on a memorial are only as good as the contributor's sources — more on that below.

How to search by name, step by step

1. Go to findagrave.com and choose the memorial search (the site opens with name fields front and center).
2. Enter the last name — that's the only required field.
3. Add a first name, and use the year fields for birth and death if you know them (even approximate years with the "±10 years" style ranges help enormously).
4. Set the location: country, then state, then county. For emigrant ancestors, remember they're buried where they died, not where they were born.
5. Press search and scan the results — each shows name, dates, and cemetery, so you can usually spot your person at a glance.

Open the memorial and you'll typically see the headstone photo, birth and death dates, the cemetery with a map, and sometimes a biography, an obituary transcript, and links to family members' memorials.

Search filters that rescue a dead-end search

The basic search misses people constantly for fixable reasons. Work through these:

• "Similar name spellings" option: turn it on to sweep in Olsen/Olson, Schmidt/Smith, and creative 19th-century spelling.
• Partial names: search the surname alone within one cemetery, or use just an initial for the first name.
• Maiden vs. married names: memorials for married women are usually filed under the married surname; the maiden name may appear in quotes or parentheses. Search both.
• Nicknames: the stone may say "Jack" while the records say John.
• No dates at all: leave the years blank and filter by county instead — fewer assumptions, more hits.
• Search a relative: can't find your ancestor? Search their spouse, child, or sibling. Family plots mean one found grave often reveals five more, already linked.

Reading a memorial like a genealogist

A memorial page can hold real evidence and real errors side by side. Sort them:

Treat every memorial as a finding aid: it tells you where to look for the death certificate, the obituary, and the church burial record. Our free death records guide shows where to confirm each date, and the obituary search guide helps you find the notice the memorial hints at.

One habit worth stealing from the pros: always look at the surrounding graves. Click through the cemetery's other interments with the same surname, or check the plot section. Husbands, wives, infant children, and in-laws cluster together, and the cluster often sketches an entire family group. When you're untangling who's who — say the plot holds your great-grandfather's brother's wife — the free relationship calculator names the connection (that's a grandaunt by marriage) instantly.

Requesting a headstone photo (free)

If you find a memorial without a photo — or no memorial at all — Find a Grave's volunteer network can help:

1. On a photo-less memorial, click the option to request a photo. The request goes out to volunteers who've signed up near that cemetery.
2. If there's no memorial, you can create one (free account required for contributing, though never for searching) and then attach a photo request.
3. Be patient and polite: fulfillment depends entirely on whether an active volunteer lives nearby. Rural cemeteries can take a while.

You can pay this forward later — photographing a few requests at your local cemetery is how the whole database got built.

Find a Grave vs. the other free grave sites

Find a Grave is the biggest, but not the only player:

• BillionGraves — free to search, built around GPS-tagged smartphone photos, so every stone has exact coordinates. Coverage differs from Find a Grave; always check both.
• Interment.net — free library of cemetery transcriptions, some from registers never photographed anywhere.
• FamilySearch — indexes Find a Grave and BillionGraves plus its own burial collections, so one free search there sweeps several sources at once.
• Cemetery and municipal offices — the sexton's burial register is the primary record behind every headstone, and it often lists plot owners and unmarked burials no website has. See our free cemetery records guide.

Contributing corrections (and getting them made)

Sooner or later you'll find a memorial with a wrong date, a misspelled name, or a missing maiden name — often for your own relative. Find a Grave has a process for this:

• Suggest an edit. Every memorial has an option to propose corrections, which go to the memorial's manager (the volunteer who created or maintains it). Include your evidence — "death certificate says 14 Mar 1922" gets accepted; "I think it's wrong" doesn't.
• Request a transfer. Site convention encourages managers to transfer memorials of your close relatives (roughly great-grandparents and nearer) to you on request, so you can maintain them directly.
• Add, don't argue. You can attach photos, obituary transcripts, and biographical notes to most memorials even without managing them — the fastest way to make a sparse memorial useful for the next researcher in your family.

A courteous message with a source attached succeeds the overwhelming majority of the time. Managers are volunteers who created millions of memorials for strangers; treat them as collaborators and your family's records improve for good.

A 15-minute Find a Grave session that actually advances your tree

Here's a compact routine worth copying whenever you pick up a new ancestor:

1. Search the name + state; open the best match and save the headstone photo and dates.
2. Click through to the cemetery page and search the surname within it — note every hit.
3. Open each same-surname memorial and record the dates and any linked relatives.
4. Check the memorial's plot or section info and look at who else shares it.
5. Screenshot or copy the obituary transcript if one is attached, then verify it later against the newspaper original.

Fifteen minutes of this regularly produces a spouse's death date, two children you hadn't confirmed, and an in-law surname you'd never met — genuine progress, entirely free.

FAQ

Is Find a Grave really free?

Yes. Searching and viewing memorials is free with no account. A free account is only needed if you want to contribute — creating memorials, uploading photos, or leaving virtual flowers. There is no paid tier for basic research.

How do I find a grave by name for free?

Go to findagrave.com, enter the surname, add a first name and a state or county if known, and search. Approximate birth or death years narrow the results dramatically. Opening memorials and viewing headstone photos costs nothing.

Is Find a Grave accurate?

Headstone photos are strong evidence, but the typed details and family links are volunteer-contributed and sometimes wrong. Use memorials as leads and confirm dates against death certificates, obituaries, and burial registers.

What if the person has no Find a Grave memorial?

Check BillionGraves and Interment.net, search FamilySearch's burial collections, and find the cemetery via the person's obituary or death certificate — then contact the cemetery office, whose register may list burials no volunteer has photographed.

Can I get a photo of a headstone without traveling?

Yes. Use Find a Grave's free photo-request feature — a volunteer near the cemetery photographs the stone and posts it to the memorial. Turnaround depends on local volunteer activity.

How do I work out my relationship to people buried in a family plot?

Trace the chain of connections from the records ("my grandmother's uncle's wife"), then enter that path into the free CousinChart calculator, which converts it into the exact relationship term.

From headstone to family tree

A single Find a Grave search can hand you exact dates, a burial place, an obituary, and a plot full of relatives — all free, all in an afternoon. Follow each new name into the records (death records, obituaries, cemetery registers), and when the plot map starts producing half-remembered relatives, let the free CousinChart relationship calculator tell you exactly who they were to you. If you're just starting out, our genealogy for beginners guide puts grave hunting in context with the rest of the free-records toolkit.