Methodology

Who builds this

Grave Archives is maintained by a small team building a respectful, ad-free alternative to the cluttered incumbents. We treat burial records as sensitive: people often arrive grieving, and the work is held to that standard. Questions, corrections, and removal requests reach a human at corrections@gravearchives.com.

Where the data comes from

The registry spine is built on CC0 / public-domain and openly-licensed sources:

• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs — Nationwide Gravesite Locator (CC0).
• USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) cemetery gazetteer (public domain).
• Wikidata (CC0) for cross-references and disambiguation.
• Open municipal, county, and council burial registers, where licensing permits.

Every record stores its source, the source's license, and when we retrieved it. Where a source requires attribution, we honor it — every memorial page links back to its source and license in the footer.

Data licensing & bulk access

Most of the registry is built on CC0 (public domain) or attribution-only open licenses. One source, the City of Cleveland's cemetery records, is published under the Open Database License (ODbL), which requires share-alike access to that specific data. We keep it as its own clearly-attributed subset rather than folding it into the CC0-labeled spine, and offer a free, machine-readable bulk export of exactly those records: download the Cleveland, OH burial records (JSONL).

How a record earns a page

We do not publish a page for every name in every source. A record is only indexed when it clears a completeness bar — it must name a real person, link to a known cemetery, and carry enough verified detail (such as a date of death or birth) to be a genuine answer rather than a thin stub. Records below that bar exist in the data but are kept out of search until they are enriched. This is deliberate: a smaller set of accurate, complete records serves people better than a flood of near-empty pages.

We show dates, plots, and other facts only when the source provides them. A blank field means the source was silent — we never infer or fabricate a value.

Dignity safeguards

Recently-deceased and restricted records are intentionally withheld from indexing and public listing. We do not gamify memorial creation, and we respond to removal requests with care. The aim is to help a person find where a loved one rests — not to maximize pages or traffic.

Native American burial records

We do not independently research or publish Native American burial-site locations. Many tribes have long objected, with good reason, to public disclosure of burial grounds — a concern rooted in a real history of grave-robbing and the exploitation of Native remains, the same history that led Congress to pass the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Federal and state law reflect the same judgment in other ways: agencies and preservation offices in California, Montana, and New York, among others, treat the location of Native American burial sites as confidential rather than public record.

Grave Archives does include Native American veterans' burials, through the same public VA records used for every veteran, and cemetery place names that are already part of the public federal geographic record. We do not go further than that on our own. If a tribe wishes to include cemetery or burial information on its own terms, we would welcome that conversation — reach us at corrections@gravearchives.com.