How are people included in Cemetery Search?

Melissa Arjona

I thought that by adding burial information on a person's profile, people would be added to the list of people within a cemetery. However, I see people with proper cemetery information who are not appearing in the cemetery search. I also clicked on a couple of random people within a cemetery; their profiles don't even have the cemetery information listed on their profile, and yet they appear within the cemetery search. So how are they being included?

SerraNola

@Melissa Arjona The database for Cemetery Search is primarily built from external cemetery data sources such as FindAGrave and BillionGraves. There is some interaction with Family Tree data, but not in the sense that it is directly sourced from Family Tree user-submitted data.

JulianBrown38

@Melissa Arjona There have been several discussions on this topic since the Cemeteries Search was released. Most of them centered on the question of how and when the database was populated, and various theories have been proposed. I think I am right in saying that the post above by @SerraNola is the first time that a user affiliated with FamilySearch has offered some information.

I have some observations about the search which don't actually answer the questions but may shed a little light on the state of the search.

1. On the opening page of the search, you may see a dismissible information banner which reads "We hope you enjoy the Cemeteries Search. Please keep in mind that this feature is experimental and has limited support.".
2. When you search for a cemetery and open its burial list, you will see that each page of burials starts with an additional button which is captioned "Add Person". If you click that button, you can add any existing profile to that burial list, either by searching for it by name, etc., or by entering its PID. You can even create a new profile on the fly.
3. Some of the entries in the burial list have a button captioned "VIEW GRAVESITE" which will take you to an entry in an external website, e.g. the BillionGraves page for that person. In the other cases, the button is captioned "ADD GRAVESITE"; in that case, you will see a dialog that includes an aerial view of the cemetery and a movable pin that you can drop at the precise location of the grave site.
4. There has been a recent and not-very-successful change to the search. From time to time, when you click an "Add Person" or "ADD GRAVESITE" button, you are presented with a dialog which requires you to sign in or create an account. This happens even though you are already signed in to FamilySearch. There are different dialogs for the two buttons.

Items 2 and 3 above suggest one way that the database could be populated, but it doesn't seem to be a very practical mechanism, to put it mildly.