About the project

About Cemetery Finders

Cemetery Finders is a research-first cemetery discovery project designed to make large public burial datasets easier to navigate, understand, and verify.

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State-level archives

161k+

Cemeteries indexed

39k+

Burial records mapped

The site is being built as a structured archive rather than a generic search experience. The goal is to help families, local historians, veterans, genealogists, and cemetery researchers move from broad geography to specific burial context without getting lost in disconnected records.

What we are trying to solve

Public cemetery data is often fragmented across government websites, cemetery operators, spreadsheets, or legacy repositories. That makes it difficult to answer simple questions such as which cemeteries exist in a county, whether a burial record belongs to the right place, or how a location fits within a state-level archive.

Cemetery Finders is designed to solve that by organizing records into a place-first structure. Instead of dropping users into isolated pages, the archive is meant to connect states, counties, cemeteries, and burial entries in a way that reflects how real research happens.

Who this archive is for

This project is intended for people doing practical record lookup and for people trying to understand burial context. That includes families tracing memorial information, researchers comparing public datasets, and cemetery teams reviewing how their location appears in public-facing directories.

How the archive is built

The system starts with source data, then normalizes slugs, geographic relationships, and metadata so the pages can scale without becoming thin or repetitive. Each page type is meant to answer a different search intent: state overview, county browse, cemetery profile, or record lookup.

How trust is handled

We publish methodology, editorial, corrections, and legal pages so visitors and search engines can understand how the site works. When records are uncertain or incomplete, the site should show that clearly instead of pretending all fields are equally reliable.

Principle 01

Structured place-first navigation

We prefer geography-led browsing over opaque record dumps, so users can move naturally from state to county to cemetery.

Principle 02

Transparent source handling

Source context and update history matter as much as the record itself, especially when cemetery and burial datasets do not match perfectly.

Principle 03

Research utility over filler

Pages are meant to help people verify places, compare records, and understand archival context instead of serving thin placeholder copy.

Project direction

Built as an archive, not a generic directory

The site is being shaped around long-term archival usefulness. That means clear hierarchy, transparent sourcing, consistent metadata, and page templates that can support strong editorial content once live state, county, cemetery, and burial pages are published at scale.

Next layers

  • Dynamic state archives with county navigation
  • Cemetery pages with map, source, and schema context
  • Burial pages connected back to place hierarchy
  • Expanded FAQs and data-reference sections