Common Grave Locator Systems
What is a Common Grave Locator?
This is my terminology for any set of cemeteries which share a website which lists people buried at those cemeteries. The largest system I'm familiar with is the US National Cemetery System run by the VA, which has over 100 cemeteries and millions of people records in their system. The smallest that I've added to the system are the two city owned cemeteries in Fort Collins, Colorado.
As a functionality note, be aware of this. Even if you don't search a particular grave locator system using this search, it will still only return people attached to a cemetery that is part of one of these systems. For instance, if you search the surname "Downen" using this search, you will only get 33 matches, because those people are interred at one of the cemeteries that is part of a common grave locator website. If you search for Downens using the main people search, it will return over 1100 matches (as of May 2020). So don't make the mistake of thinking this works just like the main people search and if you don't select a cemetery system it will work exactly the same. It is only working on a subset of the people records.
I added this search mainly because of the Forest Lawn Memorial Parks website. I completely scraped their website in 2011 and captured all the entries at that time. I have gone back from time to time and captured more records, but they have so many entries (over 600,000 and now probably over 700,000) that I have to search the site piecemeal. Adding this search to the database allowed me to more easily compare the database entries for that cemetery system to their current listings.
I don't know what other uses this search might have, but for me it is saving so much time when searching Forest Lawn that it was worth coding. If anyone else can derive any benefit at all from it, that's a bonus.
When I created this search there were eight different sets of cemeteries in my database which were part of a system. As of May 2020 that's all I have defined. As time goes by I will find more cemetery systems like this and add them to the database.
As of the end of April 2022 I added a search to the cemetery search screen that pulls up cemeteries based on their grave locator ID. I should also add this ID to the individual cemetery pages so that it's obvious if a particular cemetery is part of one of these systems.
Return to People Search constrained by Grave Locator System
Return to main People Search Screen
Return to Cemetery Search screen
