Getting names to show up when searching on the new "Cemeteries" Search option

maryjaneandrewrobbins1

How do I get names of relatives buried in a specific cemetery to show up on the "Cemeteries" search option. In two separate cases, I know exactly where the children are buried, but when I go to those cemeteries on FamilySearch, they do not show up. Do I need to link their FindAGrave listings to FamilySearch? FindAGrave sources are already listed in "Sources" on their Family Search files, and in their "vitals" sections. What else might be needed?

Thank you, Mary Jane Andrew Robbins

JulianBrown38

There have been several discussions on this subject over the last few months, including another one posted in the last day or so. You can find some of them by searching for "Cemetery Search" in this community. Unfortunately, no-one seems to know how the cemetery searches work or what exactly is required to get a particular individual to show up. The discussions don't seem to have elicited any information from within the FamilySearch organisation.

From my experience, there seem to be several factors involved:

1. Who FamilySearch considers to be a relative of yours (for the purposes of the search);
2. Exactly what burial place is set for the profile (the standard place, presumably);
3. What FindAGrave and BillionGraves source records are attached to the profile and tagged to the burial;
4. How frequently and robustly the FamilySearch collections relating to the FindAGrave and BillionGraves websites are updated over time;
5. The state of the standard place database with respect to the cemetery name. I have an example where entering a cemetery name results in three indistinguishable cemetery names that I can choose. If I select the first one of those, the result reports a grand total of 1 burial (not a relative). If I select the second cemetery, a grand total of 115 burials is reported (1 relative). For the third cemetery, 1611 burials are reported (11 relatives). There is also a fourth similar entry; if I choose that, I get another display comprising those first three entries plus a couple of other entries, both of which relate to another cemetery with a completely different name but is near the same city.

I have assumed that you are using the search that is accessed via the "Search / Cemeteries" menu item. If this is the case, you might like to try the alternative search that you can find from the "Activities / All Activities" menu item (select the "Cemeteries" icon in the second row which is entitled "All about your ancestors"). Presumably this uses the same data but it can produce different results.

I realise that all this is not going to help you in your quest, but at least you can know that you are not alone in having these problems.

maryjaneandrewrobbins1

Thank you. I will continue to work with the "Search/Cemeteries" option, and will explore the "Activities/All Activities" menu.

JulianBrown38

@maryjaneandrewrobbins1 Today, I have discovered something that you can do with the new cemetery search which may be of some help to you. If you go to the following page, you will be presented with an alphabetical list of all the cemeteries which FamilySearch thinks have burials of your relatives.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/cemeteries/sites?myFamilySites=true&page=0&pageSize=100&showMap=false&showOriginal=true

Besides cemeteries, this list may contains some other types of site: Historic Site, Memorial and Monument. There are only about 50 of those other sites, compared with over 310,000 cemetery sites.

If you scroll through the list of cemeteries, you may find several cemeteries with names that are similar (or even identical). In my case, I found the "two cemeteries" that I mentioned in my previous comment where I do have relatives buried. You might be able to find some of the missing people in cemetery clones like this. The cemetery names might not be alphabetically close to to each other, so they might appear anywhere in the list.

The names of these "cemeteries" often seem to be derived from whatever is stored in the "Cemetery" field of a source (FG or BG) which is tagged to the burial event. This is not necessarily what is in the location field of the burial event (either the user-entered location or the standard location).