Find a Grave

Review by eFreeware

Find a Grave is a free app from Ancestry.com that puts a very large burial record collection in your pocket. The developer describes it as a way to use and contribute to the biggest free online gathering of grave information, and the numbers back up the scale: more than 250 million graves spread across roughly half a million cemeteries worldwide. It sits in the Books & Reference category, has been on Google Play since December 2014, and holds a 4.8 average from 3,454 ratings at over 500,000 installs.

The main reason to consider it is that it works in both directions. You can look for a grave, and you can add to the record yourself, whether that means creating a memorial from scratch or attaching a photo and GPS coordinates to one that already exists. For anyone piecing together a family history, that combination of searching and contributing is what makes the app more than a lookup tool.

It costs nothing to install, so there is no paywall between you and the records. What you get is the catalog as it stands, plus the ability to improve it.

Searching for a grave

The core job is straightforward: type in a name and work through the results until you find the right person. With a quarter of a billion records behind the search, the challenge is usually precision rather than scarcity, and the app also lets you find cemeteries near you so you can narrow things down geographically.

That local angle matters more than it might first appear. If you know roughly where a relative lived or died, browsing cemeteries in that area can surface entries that a name search alone would miss, particularly with common surnames. It also gives you a way to plan an actual visit rather than just confirming a record exists.

The developer pitches the app as a way to find and visit a loved one's resting place at any time, and the cemetery-locating feature is what turns that from a slogan into something you can act on. I would expect this to be the part most people use first, and for many it may be all they need.

Adding memorials and photos

Contributing is where the app asks a little more of you. You can create a memorial with a biography and photos, which is essentially a small profile page for someone who has died. You can also add a headstone photo and GPS coordinates to a memorial that someone else has already started, filling in details that were missing.

There is a workflow for volume work as well. The app lets you photograph several graves and upload the images for transcription later, which suits someone walking a cemetery and recording rows of headstones in one trip rather than entering each one on the spot. That is a sensible division of labor: capture outdoors, type indoors.

If you would rather not travel, you can request a headstone photo from another user, or take one yourself and share it right away. Either way, the photo becomes part of the record. The developer's framing is that you are honoring ancestors by building memorials, and while that is a sentimental way to put it, the practical effect is a growing set of documented graves.

Discoveries can be passed along through Facebook, email or text messages, which is useful when several relatives are following the same line of research and you want them to see what you turned up without describing it over the phone.

Profiles, tracking and virtual cemeteries

The app keeps a running account of what you have done. You can track your own memorials, the photos you have uploaded and any virtual cemeteries you set up, which are groupings of graves that matter to you rather than physical places. For a project that can stretch across years and several branches of a family, that kind of bookkeeping is not a minor convenience.

You also manage your own profile and can look at the profiles of other contributors. That gives the collection a social layer.

Anyone who has done genealogy research knows how easily notes and photographs scatter across folders, phones and email threads. Keeping memorials, images and cemetery lists in one place is the quiet argument for using the app rather than a browser.

What you need to get going

Getting started is a matter of installing the app and searching. There is no cost to download it, so the barrier to trying it is essentially your own curiosity about a name.

The features that involve contributing lean on your phone's camera and location hardware, but if your interest is purely in looking things up, none of that is required.

The app has been on the store since late 2014, which means the current version reflects a long stretch of incremental work rather than a recent rebuild.

Who this suits

This is a natural fit for family historians and genealogists who are already chasing names through records and want burial information in the same effort. It also suits the less systematic user: someone who has a specific grandparent or great-grandparent in mind and simply wants to know where the grave is and what the headstone says.

It should appeal to people who visit cemeteries in person, whether to photograph a family plot or to document a whole section for others to use later. The request-a-photo option covers the opposite case, where distance or time makes a visit impractical but a picture of the marker would still mean something.

The app is built around burial records and memorial pages. Someone hoping for a broad genealogy suite with census returns, immigration records and DNA tools will find a narrower instrument here, focused on graves and cemeteries. That focus is the point, but it does define the edges of what the app does.

A free tool for grave research and recording

Find a Grave earns a place on the phone of anyone researching where relatives are buried. The catalog is enormous, the search is the kind of thing you can do in a spare ten minutes, and the contribution tools give you a reason to keep the app installed after the first question is answered.

The trade-offs are modest and mostly about scope. This is a burial record app, not a full research platform, and the parts that involve adding photos and coordinates assume you have a camera, a location and some willingness to do field work.

If you have a name and a rough idea of a place, install it and start there. If you are the family member who ends up photographing headstones on behalf of everyone else, the bulk upload and virtual cemetery tracking are likely to make it a regular stop.

What's new in version 4.0.2

Bug fixes.