01What does Find a Grave offer, and how large is its database?
Find a Grave, owned by Ancestry, has indexed more than 265 million grave records across approximately 500,000 cemeteries in more than 200 countries. This database was built almost entirely by volunteers who visit cemeteries, photograph headstones, and transcribe inscription data. For historical research — confirming where a great-grandparent is buried, discovering the cemetery where a family clustered over generations, or finding records from small rural burial grounds no official agency has catalogued — Find a Grave's breadth is genuinely unmatched.
Volunteers on Find a Grave can be requested to photograph a specific grave, and many respond quickly. For families researching ancestors in distant states, this community service is enormously valuable. Find a Grave also allows family members and friends to claim a memorial and add biographical information, photographs, and tributes — creating a crowdsourced record that can be found through search engines.
02Where does Find a Grave fall short for families making an in-person cemetery visit?
Find a Grave's practical limitation is precisely its ceiling: the platform tells you the cemetery, not where in the cemetery the grave is. It shows a memorial page with photographs; it cannot navigate you to the stone. This is not a minor gap — it is the entire problem families face when they arrive at a 200-acre cemetery with a name and no other guidance. The grief and frustration most families report on cemetery visits comes not from failing to find the right cemetery but from wandering the grounds unable to locate the specific marker.
Find a Grave also has no grave care component. You cannot order cleaning, flowers, flag placement, or any maintenance service through the platform. And because records are volunteer-contributed, errors accumulate over time — a wrong birth year or misspelled name entered by a well-meaning volunteer can only be corrected by another volunteer, not by the cemetery whose official register holds the accurate information.
03What does Memor offer that Find a Grave does not?
Memor's core functions are cemetery-verified burial records, GPS walking navigation to specific graves, a grave-care marketplace, and a cemetery management platform. When Memor partners with a cemetery, the cemetery's official burial register is digitized and each grave's location is tied to a surveyed GPS coordinate. The result: a family can search a name, confirm the grave from official records, and walk directly to the marker — all from within the same app.
GPS walking navigation is the most requested feature among Memor users because it solves the most common problem. Memor's live walking icon updates in real time as you move through the cemetery, the same way a driving icon works on a highway. In national cemeteries with hundreds of thousands of identical markers, and in large private cemeteries with sections that stretch out of sight, this guidance is the difference between a meaningful visit and an hour of fruitless searching.
04How do the two platforms handle record accuracy?
Find a Grave records are volunteer-contributed and carry the accuracy of their contributors. A well-documented grave may have photographs, accurate dates, and a full biography; a poorly documented one may carry incorrect information that no authority figure can correct. There is no connection between Find a Grave's records and the cemetery's official burial register — the two systems exist entirely in parallel.
Memor's records originate from the cemetery's own burial register, digitized in partnership with the cemetery. This makes them authoritative by definition — they are the official record, not a transcription of a headstone by a stranger. Family contributions such as photographs, biographical notes, and personal stories are layered on top of the official record rather than replacing it, so the verified data and the family memory coexist without one overwriting the other.
05Which platform should you use for grave care and ongoing maintenance?
Find a Grave has no grave care component whatsoever. If you want to arrange cleaning, flowers, flag placement, or site maintenance for a grave you cannot visit in person, the platform offers no path to do so. Its function ends at the memorial page.
Memor's care marketplace is built specifically for families who cannot visit. Browse vetted local caretakers, select a service, specify the grave, and place the order. The caretaker performs the work and sends photo confirmation — a photograph of the tribute in place or the cleaned stone — directly to you. Services include headstone cleaning, site clearing, fresh flowers, seasonal wreaths, and flag placement. Orders can be set up as recurring visits for ongoing care, so the grave is maintained year-round without requiring the family to place a new order each season.
06Which platform is better for cemetery operators and administrators?
Find a Grave has no tools for cemetery operators. Cemetery staff members have no administrative access to Find a Grave listings — they cannot correct official records, manage their cemetery's entry, or access the platform's data about their burial grounds. A cemetery administrator who creates a Find a Grave account uses the same volunteer interface as any other user, with no elevated permissions tied to their professional role.
Memor includes a full cemetery management platform: a web dashboard for burial records, interactive GPS-mapped plot inventory, pre-booking for available plots, work-order tracking, and a family-facing navigation layer built on the same data. Cemeteries that join Memor gain both an internal management tool and a public-facing navigation product for families simultaneously. Updates made in the staff dashboard appear on the family-facing map in real time.
07Which platform should you use — and can you use both?
Use Find a Grave for historical and genealogical research where breadth of index matters most — its volunteer database is enormous and remains the best single resource for confirming where a historical figure or ancestor is buried. Use Memor when you are actually going to a cemetery, when you need to order care from a distance, when you want a private family memorial page you control, or when you are administering a cemetery's records.
Many families use both: Find a Grave to confirm which cemetery the person is buried in, Memor to navigate there and keep the grave maintained. The two platforms are more complementary than competing for the typical user. The choice between them is not either/or — it is a question of which problem you are solving at any given moment.