This site is just getting off the ground, but it’ll be really cool if it takes off.

Names in Stone is a cemetery mapping site—you can search for a grave and get a map showing where it is in the cemetery and whose plots are nearby.

Only a handful of cemeteries are covered as yet, mostly in Utah, Idaho, Nevada and California.

You can encourage larger, managed cemeteries to participate, or map smaller, volunteer-run cemeteries yourself and upload the data. (Get instructions on the site. More mapping tips are on an associated blog called Grave Mappers.)

It’s free to search on a name and see available details from that person’s headstone—could be birth and death dates, burial date, parents’ names, military service, etc.—as well as the grave location (shown below), cemetery name, cemetery map, address, GPS coordinates and driving directions.



You can purchase virtual gravestone décor; you decorate the stone yourself by dragging and dropping images of flowers and swags.

Paying members ($7.95 per month, $39.99 per year) can save searches, save a “cemeteries of interest” list, be notified of matches to automated searches and receive discounts on gravestone décor.

Richard Smart wrote me from across the pond about an organization he directs, The National Archive of Memorial Inscriptions.

On its Web site, you’ll find a database of 170,000 names from 580 burial grounds in Bedfordshire and Norfolk, and it’s added to regularly.

You can search by name, a death date range, age range at death, county, and place. Wildcards work: ? stands for one letter; * (asterisk) substitutes for any number of letters.

You get quite a bit of information for free—first and last name, burial ground and county, and date of death. Buy the full inscription for 4 pounds (about $6), and for most records, add historical text, a photo of the church and/or a plan of the graveyard for 1 pound (about $1.50) each.

Fuzzy on the details of your ancestor’s burial, or want to see who else is in a graveyard?

Smart shared this tip for browsing: “If you enter any place from the Availability page, in either Bedfordshire or Norfolk, into the Place box on the home page, you will get free of charge a listing of all the data available from that place, except for the actual inscription.”

Last week after talking about kids’ genealogy in Sacramento, Calif., I met up with my sister in San Francisco for a couple of days (she lives 20 minutes from me here in Cincinnati, but was also out West on business).

One of my favorite sights was Mission Dolores, the popular name for the Misión San Francisco de Asís since it was founded June 29, 1776. The present mission chapel, built in 1791, is a block and a half away from the first location.



Still home to an active parish, it’s the oldest intact building in San Francisco—the thick adobe walls survived the 1906 earthquake. Next door is the Mission Dolores Basilica, first built around 1876 and rebuilt after suffering severe quake damage.

The walled Mission Cemetery, final resting place for Ohlone, Miwok and other indigenous peoples as well as notable pioneers, is the only cemetery left within city limits.






The cemetery is smaller today than it once was, but has been restored with native plantings.



You can find known Mission Dolores burials listed at FindaGrave. Read a bit more about the cemetery’s past in the transcribed historical newspaper articles on SFGenealogy.com.