When I first wrote about Find a Grave in 2011 they had 62 million records. Now they are up to 219 million. That is a great increase but there are millions of graves that are still not in Find a Grave. As an example let’s take Mt. Hope Cemetery. I know that there are over 200,000 burials there. The Find a Grave cemetery page for Mt. Hope says that they currently have records for 126,899 added memorials of which there are 45% photographed. That is probably the same for most large cemeteries in the US. Some smaller rural cemeteries probably don’t have any photos of their graves. So there is a long way to go.

Find a Grave has made changes over the years but they recently made some big changes for recently deceased people. There have been some complaints over the years that a listing for a deceased person would be added even before the burial. That has been a big complaint of relatives of the deceased. So Find a Grave has a new policy that when a recent memorial is added that they ask if you are related. If not then the memorial is restricted for 3 months. You can see the name, birth date and death date but no other information. Relatives can “claim” the memorial for a deceased family member for up to a year. After that, they can request the memorial owner but they get to decide if it is transferred or not.

Also if you create a memorial for someone deceased in the past it asks if you are related. If you indicate you are related you can choose to have the memorial record show your relationship or not.

The complete list of changes to Find a Grave is on this web page.