Find a Grave Alternatives: 6 Options for Graves, Records and Memorials
People look for Find a Grave alternatives for two completely different reasons, and the right answer depends entirely on which one you are.
The first reason is research. You are trying to locate an ancestor's grave, the record is missing or wrong, and you want another database to cross-check. The second is personal. Someone you love died recently, a volunteer created a Find a Grave memorial for them before you had finished the funeral, and the page now sitting at the top of the search results is a photograph of a headstone and a few dates β accurate, public, and not remotely what you would have written.
Those two needs pull toward different tools. This article covers both, and says plainly which entries serve which.
What Find a Grave Is Good At
Credit where it is due, because the scale is genuinely hard to replicate.
Find a Grave is a collaborative database of cemetery records, owned by Ancestry, and as of 2026 it claims more than 265 million memorials. It is free. Volunteers photograph headstones, transcribe inscriptions and fulfil photo requests from people who live too far away to visit. It maintains curated lists of notable burials. For finding where someone is buried, nothing else comes close.
Two things about it are worth knowing before you go looking elsewhere:
- Anyone can create a memorial, including for someone who died last week, without asking the family.
- Immediate family can ask for control. Find a Grave's policy is to remove a memorial, or transfer its management, at the request of an immediate family member. If a stranger's page for your mother is bothering you, that is the first thing to do β not the last.
Where it runs out is temperament. It is a records database with a memorial page bolted on. The layout is a grave record; the tone is archival; and the emotional centre of gravity is the headstone, not the person. That is exactly right for genealogy and exactly wrong for a family in month one.
For Research: Three Databases to Cross-Check
1. BillionGraves β free, and GPS-accurate
The most direct competitor. Volunteers photograph headstones using a phone app that records GPS coordinates, so records come with a real location rather than a cemetery name. It partners with MyHeritage, which widens who can find the records.
Cost. Free to search, photograph and transcribe. BillionGraves Plus adds research tools at $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year. You can also earn a free month of Plus by contributing volume β the published threshold is 1,000 photographs or 500 transcriptions in a month.
Where it runs out. Coverage is far smaller than Find a Grave's, and skews toward cemeteries volunteers have walked with the app. Check it second, not first.
2. FamilySearch β free, no subscription at all
Run as a non-profit service, FamilySearch holds an enormous body of records including burials, and unlike most genealogy sites it is free without tiers. Useful precisely because its record set was assembled differently from Ancestry's, so the gaps fall in different places.
Where it runs out. It is a records platform, not a memorial platform. Nothing here is designed to be read by a grieving relative.
3. WikiTree β free, one shared tree
A single collaborative family tree maintained by volunteers, free and funded by advertising. Its strength is that profiles carry sourcing standards, so a burial claim usually comes with a citation you can check.
Where it runs out. Coverage is thinner again, and the collaborative single-tree model means you are editing alongside strangers who may disagree with you about your own family.
If the grave is genuinely untraceable in all four, the cemetery office itself is still the best record in existence β most will check a burial register by phone.
For a Family: Three Places a Memorial Can Live
4. Keeper Memorials β for when the grave is part of the memorial
Keeper is the closest thing to a bridge between the two halves of this article. It has cemetery navigation across a very large grave database, sells QR grave markers directly, and includes a family tree β while still being a memorial page a family would actually want to read.
Cost. Free tier limited to one page and five photos or videos; $99 once for Plus.
Where it runs out. The free tier's five-file limit is tight, and it is English only. We wrote about it in detail in our Keeper Memorials review.
5. Forever Missed β for a long written life story
Free tier, eighteen-plus years of operation, and no pressure to keep it short. Good when the person deserves three thousand words rather than a headstone transcription.
Where it runs out. Advertising on the free tier, and a design that reads as dated next to newer tools. Forever Missed alternatives has the full comparison.
6. GetMemorial β for a page the family keeps adding to
Ours, so weigh it accordingly. GetMemorial is built for the years after the funeral rather than the week of it: photos, stories and tributes accumulating over time, with relatives contributing from their own phones instead of sharing one login.
Pricing. Free to start. Premium is $4.99 a month, $39.99 a year, or $89.99 once for a lifetime page. Free pages carry no ads.
What it does badly. No cemetery database, no grave navigation, no family tree, no headstone photo requests β every single thing this article's first half is about, we do not do. Native iOS app; Android is in development, not shipped. If you came here to find where someone is buried, close this section and use BillionGraves.
Side by Side
| Free | Grave records | Reads like a memorial | Family controls the page | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Find a Grave | Yes | 265M+ | No | On request |
| BillionGraves | Yes (Plus $59.99/yr) | Large, GPS-tagged | No | On request |
| FamilySearch | Yes | Large | No | n/a |
| WikiTree | Yes | Moderate | No | Collaborative |
| Keeper | Limited free tier | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Forever Missed | Yes, with ads | No | Yes | Yes |
| GetMemorial | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
If a Stranger Made a Page for Your Relative
This is common enough to deserve its own instructions, and most people never find out they have options.
- Request management or removal. Find a Grave's stated policy is to transfer or remove a memorial at the request of an immediate family member. Use the support form on the memorial itself and say which you want.
- Decide what you actually want. Transferring gives you a page you can correct and add to. Removing leaves a gap that another volunteer may refill next year.
- Fix the facts before the photos. Dates and spellings are what other databases copy from. A wrong date propagates for decades.
- Put the real memorial somewhere you own, and link the grave record to it. The grave record answers where; the memorial answers who. Trying to make one page do both is why families end up unhappy with either.
If you want the two to point at each other physically as well as online, a QR code on the headstone is the usual method, and cheaper than most people assume.
How to Choose in Two Minutes
- Looking for a grave: Find a Grave first, BillionGraves second, FamilySearch third, then phone the cemetery office.
- Building a family history: FamilySearch or WikiTree, and see how to record a family history before you start collecting.
- Someone died recently: none of the databases. Start a memorial page the family controls, then add the grave record later when there is a headstone to photograph.
The wider field of memorial platforms β including the ones that undercut us on price β is in our comparison of ten online memorial websites.
FAQ
Is Find a Grave free? Yes, to search, browse and create memorials. It is owned by Ancestry, which sells subscriptions to its own record collections, but Find a Grave itself does not require one.
Can I have a Find a Grave memorial removed? Find a Grave's policy is to remove a memorial or transfer its management at the request of an immediate family member. Use the support link on the memorial page and state your relationship.
What is the best free Find a Grave alternative? BillionGraves, for grave records specifically β free to search, GPS-tagged photographs, and a record set assembled independently, which is what makes it useful as a cross-check.
Why do two sites show different burial dates? Because most entries are volunteer transcriptions of a weathered stone, and one of them misread it. When records disagree, the cemetery's own burial register settles it.
Can I use Find a Grave as a memorial page for someone who just died? You can, and many families do because it appears in search results quickly. It is a record rather than a memorial, though β there is no natural place for the family to keep adding, and you are hosting the memory of someone you love inside a genealogy database you do not control. See why permanence is the thing to check.
GetMemorial helps families build beautiful, lasting online memorials in minutes β a permanent home for tributes, photos, and stories. Start a free online memorial website of your own.
