Search Death Records (United States)
U.S. Newspapers, 50 State Full Search (1690-present)- U.S. Obituary Database Search, (1696-present)
- U.S. Birth Announcements Database, (1700s-present)
How Can I Find Out Where Someone Is Buried for Free?
You can find out where someone is buried for free by running names searches on various cemetery records databases. There are several that free with millions of records from across the world. These databases show where is someone is buried, their pertinent dates of birth and death, and often times their plot location.
Using Cemetery Records Websites
Over the past 20 years, several online websites have specialized in gathering burial records from a variety of sources. These include cemeteries, government agencies, churches, historical societies, and volunteer genealogists.
These websites allow free, unlimited name searches to find out where someone is buried. Some of these websites are crowd-sourced, using website visitors to submit family history information. Others are based on acquring records straight from primary sources, like cemeteries, government agencies, and churches. There are also many volunteer projects that visit cemeteries and record tombstone inscriptions.
Where Can I Find These Websites?
This website you are reading is one of the largest websites that acquire cemetery records straight from primary sources. To run a search, visit our, "Cemetery Records Search Page".
Crowd-sourced websites like Find-A-Grave and BillionGraves rely on the general public to contribute records gathered from a wide-variety of sources like obituaries, tombstone inscriptions, or old books and manuscripts.
There are also specialty search engines that index cemetery records from specific regions. Try visiting sites like "New York Cemetery Records", "Ireland Cemetery Records", and "Missouri Cemetery Records".
If You Know Where This Person Died
If you happen to know what city or local region this person died, you can try cold-calling every funeral home in that area. Every person who dies has to have their remains disposed of through some kind of proper means. That is, the body must either be buried or cremated. That means, there is almost always a funeral home or mortuary that handles that disposition. Some cemeteries have their own on-site funeral home.
Contact the Public Administrator or Coroner
In the United States, every county or large city has a "Public Administrator" that handles the affairs of deceased persons who have no other relatives to handle their estates. The Public Administrator is the one who arranges for that deceased person's burial or cremation. Often times, the Public Administrator falls under the jurisdiction of the Coroner's Office.
The Public Administrator has contracts with local cemeteries and funeral homes to handle the final disposition.
Hence, if you believe the person you are looking for had no family to claim their body, then most likely the Public Administrator or Coroner was involved. They should have records on which funeral home or cemetery handled the remains.
What If You Don't Know Where This Person Died?
If you don't know this person's residence of place of death, then it's going to be more difficult to find out where they are buried.
In this case, you're going to have to ask other poeple who knew this person for any information. If you can at least get the place of death, or the local area where they lived, you can then try calling the Public Administrator, Coroner, or just cold-calling every funeral home in that area.
