Southern Cemetery how to find a grave. About how to find a grave in a cemetery in different ways

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Question from Elizaveta Petrovna Baranova

Bratsk, Irkutsk region

The problem arose when on May 9 I arrived in my small homeland and wanted to visit the graves of my relatives in the cemetery. But I couldn’t find them, because everything had changed so much. I know that my grandfather and grandmother are buried near Kuznetsovka, but I couldn’t find the grave. And I really wanted to show my grandchildren where their ancestors lie. Maybe you can advise how to find the graves of relatives?

Answer

There are several options for searching for the graves of deceased relatives.

• Contact the cemetery administration, if available. The data that is needed for the search is the last name, first name, patronymic of the deceased, date of birth and date of death. If you only remember your last name and first name, you can find several graves at once. You will have to go through all of them and find the one you need using the photograph, if the photo remains on the grave. In addition, all data about the deceased buried in the cemetery is in the registration book, so you need to find them and look for information in this book.
• Visit the death registration department of the civil registry office. Events that happened to a person before 1990 were recorded at his place of registration. If you have a death certificate, it also contains information about where it was issued. At the registry office you can obtain information not only about the place where a person was buried, but also find out where he lived before his death. By the way, the number of the burial plot was often written on the back of the death certificate.

The situation when people do not know where the grave of a deceased relative or loved one is located is not uncommon. The solution is currently quite simple. There are several ways to find out where a person is buried now:

• with the help of the cemetery administration;
• registry office;
• churches;
• Internet;
• private detective agencies.

You can find the necessary information about a burial even without a death certificate. To do this, you need to know the name of the deceased, dates of birth and death, as well as the person’s last place of residence. The listed data will help to significantly narrow the circle of searches and find the grave.

How to find a grave in a cemetery by last name?

The easiest way to find the burial of a deceased relative by last name is to contact the cemetery administration. This method works ideally if information about the burial place or death certificate is available. Quite often, the back side of such paper contains the coordinates of the grave. By the burial number you can easily find its location.

You can contact the cemetery administration even if there is no death certificate. This organization keeps strict records of all burials. Cemetery employees always record at what time and place a person was buried.

To obtain information about the location of a specific grave, they should provide the full name, date of birth and death of the relative. There is a possibility that several people will be buried with such data. Therefore, to find the right grave, you will have to visit all the mentioned burial places. Having a photograph on the monument will help identify a deceased relative.

You can try to find a relative’s grave through the cemetery administration even if the exact location of the burial is not known. After all, there are not many places in a particular locality where people are buried. It may take a very short period of time.

There are often cases when the cemetery administration uses a grave as abandoned. In other words, other dead people are buried in such a site. Such “sharing” does not contradict the norms of our legislation. The law states that, if a decade has passed since the last burial, other deceased people can be buried in a similar place. If the grave of a relative or loved one has become abandoned, it is almost useless to look for it.

How to find a grave in a cemetery using the church?

Many cemeteries have a church. In it, the dead are buried on their last journey. If there is information about ordering a funeral service, people searching for a deceased relative can visit a Christian organization. In cemetery churches, information about the burial place of the deceased is usually entered in special registration books. You can obtain information from such an institution without presenting documents about your relationship.

How to find a grave in a cemetery using the registry office?

The Civil Registry Office is an organization that knows absolutely everything about the life and death of citizens. Here it is possible, but with difficulty, to find a human burial. To obtain such information, the interested person should contact the mentioned organization and may have to write a statement. Civil registry office employees have information not only about where a particular person died. The archives of this organization contain information about the burial place of each citizen, as well as about his last place of residence.

When visiting the registry office, you should know that registration of death events until the 90s of the last century was carried out only at the place of registration of citizens. Therefore, it is quite possible that this institution simply will not have information about very old burials.

A third party may be denied the coordinates of a cemetery. Civil registry office employees provide information only to relatives of the deceased. Therefore, before visiting a government agency, you should prepare documents confirming your relationship.

How to find out where a person is buried via the Internet?

Nowadays nothing is impossible; with the help of the World Wide Web you can find almost everything. Is it possible to find a deceased person on the Internet? To do this, you should visit a special website. An impressive number of such resources have been created for the post-Soviet space.

1. For example, a unique project Pomnim.by was created for the cities of Belarus. It also provides information about cemeteries in Russia. On this site you can find data on a million burials. In addition to this web resource, the KBO Special Plant website may be useful for residents of this country. Many special books stored in local cemeteries were included in the information bins of this project.
2. Russia does not lag behind the friendly power. Its volunteers collected information about many Russian cemeteries. Thus, many burial places in the Moscow region can be found on the website Poiskzakhoroneniy.rf. Using this resource it is quite easy to find information about a specific deceased. A convenient service search engine is available to help guests.
3. The site-memory.rf is an all-Russian database of graves. This portal contains information about burial sites located in various parts of the state. This service has a very convenient interface. On it, the search is carried out by full name, dates of birth and death, as well as localities. Anyone can visit the mentioned site. You can even use the services of this resource with Android.
4. Specialized burial sites were also created for Ukrainians. One of the best services of this format is POMNIM.com.ua. This portal allows you to find the desired grave in any region of the state. The search for a deceased relative is carried out by full name, date of birth and death, name or coordinates of the cemetery. You can use the services of this service from a PC or gadget.

Is it possible to find the grave of a deceased person with a minimum amount of data?

It often happens that relatives and friends who have information about the burial place disappear without a trace. What to do in such cases and where to go? Knowing the full name of the deceased, date of birth and death (or approximate dates), as well as the last place of residence, you can find the person’s grave with the help of the administration of the cemetery, church or registry office.

What if none of these methods worked? For such cases, there is a fail-safe option - to resort to the services of experienced specialists. Currently, there are a number of organizations that are looking for people. Specialists from such offices will monitor all surrounding cemeteries, registry offices and churches in the shortest possible time.

They will be able to find a grave in the cemetery much earlier and ensure a positive result than the customer himself would do. The only disadvantage of this method is the high price for professional services.

Is it possible to find the burial place of someone who died in the Great Patriotic War?

A huge number of people did not return from the Great Patriotic War. Many of them are still wanted by their relatives. At the moment, finding the grave of someone who died in the Great Patriotic War has become much easier than a decade ago. For these purposes, many information sites have been created.

1. Memorial is the world's largest database. There are no analogues to it on the entire planet. This service contains about 14 million sheets of archival documents. Work to improve a useful and necessary project is carried out daily. In the database you can find not only a mention of a specific person, but also reports of losses and lists of those buried. To obtain the most accurate information, it is advisable to know not only the person’s full name and year of birth. In addition to this data, information about the branch of service, military unit, regiment, division, etc. will definitely be useful. a soldier who died in the Great Patriotic War.
2. In order to find the burial place of a WWII participant, you can use the database on this site obd-memorial.ru. This resource provides information about millions of soldiers' graves. To create this site, about 40 million documents provided by volunteers were digitized. Visitors to the resource can use a convenient search engine and a clear interface.
3. Is it possible to find a front-line soldier on some other site? Can. In the "Feat of the People" database. Here, however, we are not talking about burials. This service provides users with information about the awards of heroes and the combat path of a particular military unit. He tells descendants about the glory of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers. It is worth visiting for anyone who wants to be proud of their brave relatives.

The issue of searching for a grave or burial place of a person may concern many citizens of the Russian Federation and foreigners who had relatives who died on Russian territory. At the same time, there are various ways to find a grave and find out the burial place, but any of them may require significant effort.

How to find out where a person is buried

The main organization through which you can obtain information about the place of burial of a person and the characteristics of his death are the civil registry offices. It is this body that issues a death certificate, and it is in its jurisdiction that information not only about the place of death and burial, but also about the last place of residence can be kept. You can also clarify information about a person’s place of residence at the Migration Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. However, none of these bodies stores information about the immediate location of the grave or other burial place.

Therefore, the most effective way to determine the burial place is to contact the cemetery administration. It is in the cemetery book that information about all burials is stored, with their markings by site - each grave has its own “address” in the cemetery, and the register says who is buried in it. Thus, it is possible to find the place where a deceased person rests, even if his monument or tombstone has long since fallen into disrepair, and the area near the grave itself is completely overgrown with weeds.

To obtain the necessary information, depending on the authority, you must provide a certain package of documents. In particular, the registry office may disclose information about the last place of residence of the deceased solely on the basis of the death certificate of that person in hand. It will be enough to present to the Ministry of Internal Affairs any documents that can certify the existence of at least some kind of relationship with the deceased, but information available to law enforcement agencies may not always be disclosed. It is usually quite simple for the cemetery administration to simply send a statement with the name, surname and patronymic of the deceased, as well as the approximate date of death.

How to find a grave if there is no death certificate

In order to find a person’s grave without having a death certificate in hand, and even more so without knowing where he lived, when he died and in which specific cemetery he could be buried, you will have to make a lot of effort. Of course, the easiest way would be to ask possible acquaintances or relatives, but this is not always possible. Anyone can help in determining the place of death - by contacting him with the exact passport details of the deceased, you can find out whether the inheritance of such a person was opened and how it was formalized. Accordingly, the city where the inheritance was opened in most cases is the city where the person in question died.

note

The notary is not obliged to disclose information about the death of a certain person. Therefore, you should not ask him whether a particular person died. It is necessary to clarify whether an inheritance has been opened, and from which notary it could have been opened based on the specific passport data of the deceased.

After this, you can go to the city cemeteries of the city you are looking for and ask their administration for the necessary information. It should be noted that representatives of such administration are not always present at the cemetery - often they can be in offices, not at all where the cemetery is located. Moreover, in some cases, the search for administration may also be delayed due to the fact that those responsible for the cemetery may have a very unstable visiting schedule. The easiest way to find out where you can view the cemetery register is by calling the cemetery administration. You can find out such a telephone number at the city information service or at the department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Modern effective ways to search for the dead in a cemetery

Now technology is developing and helping people in everything. You can also find a dead person in a cemetery in a wide variety of modern ways. Some of them are suitable for minimizing the cost of personal time, while others will simply work with minimal probability. Convenient, simple and quick ways to find the burial place of a particular person are:

• Hiring a private detective;
• Contacting newspapers and media;
• Use of specialized Internet services dedicated to the deceased.

In general, each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages. Private detectives have extremely high efficiency and are good at finding the graves of relatives and loved ones in the cemetery in the shortest possible time - on average, no more than three weeks pass from the moment of concluding an agreement to receiving a result on such issues. Internet services are a developing area and modern databases contain information about a very small number of deceased people and their burial places.

However, in most cases, anyone can add the necessary information to such projects, which is why they are growing rapidly. Particularly popular are sites looking for places of death and burial of people who died during the Great Patriotic War.

An advertisement in newspapers and other media will help find any contacts with the deceased person. Perhaps one of the relatives or simply people present at the funeral will be able to respond. The search on television is even more effective - programs dedicated to finding relatives, both living and deceased, are extremely popular.

But not everyone can get on television. While in many newspapers advertisements about searching for a grave or burial place of a deceased person can even be placed for free.

In Russia there is not yet a unified database on burials in cemeteries in Russia

Sooner or later in a person’s life there comes a time when he begins to become interested in the past of his family. As a rule, this interest leads to the search for burials.

Unfortunately, the current state of the Russian funeral services sector does not make it possible to quickly and easily find the grave of a deceased person. The problem is related to the lack of a unified database on burials in cemeteries in Russia.

Previously, information about the grave was stored exclusively in the archives of the cemetery where the burial took place, and a unified register of burials - common for the entire country - was not maintained. But paper documentation is not always reliable and is often lost.

Many archives were lost during the Great Patriotic War. The problem of data preservation was also related to the principles of organizing the archive of personal data of citizens in the Russian Federation and the USSR (for example, registry offices register the fact of death, but not funerals).

Now it has been decided to create a system for recording cemeteries and a unified database for recording burial data on the territory of the Russian Federation. A unified database of those responsible for the maintenance of the burial (grave) will also be created.

Find a grave - search methods:

Through the cemetery administration

If you know in which cemetery the grave of the deceased is located, contact the cemetery administration. It stores data about all the burials that took place: who was buried, when and in what area. If you know at least the approximate date of death of the deceased, you can quickly find the desired record.

Through the State Budgetary Institution “Ritual” (Moscow) or the regional municipal unitary enterprise “Ritual”

The cemeteries of Moscow and New Moscow are under the jurisdiction of the State Budgetary Institution “Ritual”; cemeteries in other regions are accountable to municipal ritual services. State Budgetary Institution “Ritual” and similar services have access to archives and registration books of cemeteries. Based on them, databases of burials are compiled. These databases are incomplete, but there is always a chance that with their help you will be able to find the information you need.

When contacting a funeral service, you may need a stamp death certificate. To find out the contacts and address of the municipal funeral service, you should contact the information service of the city administration, the MFC or the registry office.

Through the Ministry of Defense - if the deceased died (died) during the Second World War and was a military serviceman

Through the joint efforts of volunteers and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, an open Memorial database was created, containing more than 20 million records of losses in the Great Patriotic War.

There is also a database “In Memory of the Heroes of the Great War of 1914-1918”. It provides information about more than 2 million participants in the First World War, including their burial places. These resources do not always indicate the exact location of the grave, but they can help determine the approximate location of the service member's death. The information obtained can help find the location of the mass grave where the remains of the deceased are buried. The Department of Defense also has detailed records of many military personnel, both those who died while serving and those who died after retiring. Relatives of the deceased can obtain this information privately by contacting the reception desk of the Ministry of Defense.

Find a relative who has a burial certificate

This document contains all the necessary information: in which cemetery the person was buried and where the grave plot is located.

Interview funeral participants

People can remember which cemetery the funeral took place in and where the grave is located. Ask your relatives for help, try to find close friends and acquaintances. If for one reason or another this is not possible, try to find the organization where he worked: one of his colleagues may have participated in the funeral himself or knew the participants. Finally, if the last place of residence of the deceased is known, try asking neighbors. Searching “through people” is often underestimated, but it often brings the desired result.

Through specialized sites for searching burials

One of the largest and most trusted resources is the Pomnim.pro website. It contains information about almost 2 million burials in 27 cities of the CIS, which often allows you to find a grave by the name of the deceased. If you were unable to find information using the existing database, the project also provides a service for searching burials on request. Some private investigation (detective) agencies are also engaged in searching for burials.

Search for a grave based on available information and documents

If none of the methods above helped, then you should try the following sequence of actions:

Determine the last place of residence of the deceased. Find out the city of residence - usually the funeral takes place in the same city where the person lived. It is advisable to find out the exact address.

Find the stamp's death certificate. If it is not there, then contact the registry office or MFC at the last place of residence of the deceased for a copy. To do this, you will need to provide your passport and a document confirming your relationship with the deceased (birth certificate or marriage certificate).

Set the date of death. This information is on the certificate. If you were unable to find or obtain a death certificate, then try to find the approximate date from personal correspondence, obituary and other records.

Contact the cemetery administration with available information. If the deceased died in a city with a large number of cemeteries, try to find out which cemeteries were buried in the year of his death (the city administration may have this information).

If you are unable to determine the burial place based on the cemetery’s archival data, contact the church at the cemetery. Priests in cemetery churches usually record all funeral and burial ceremonies.

If the previous points did not produce results, then all that remains is to try to find a grave by name in the cemetery. To do this, you will need to do painstaking and time-consuming work, examining cemetery tombstones.

Example of a burial search

Finding the graves of heroes of the Great Patriotic War is a difficult task. Dmitry I. encountered it, deciding to find the place where his grandfather, a participant in the war, died and was buried. Dmitry didn’t know much about his grandfather, only his name, year, place of birth and the fact that he died somewhere in Latvia.

Turning to the resource obd-memorial.ru, Dmitry managed to find his grandfather’s last place of service, as well as information about where and when he died. The commander of the unit where Dmitry’s grandfather served drew up a map with a burial diagram - however, a search on Google Maps showed that now there is only a ravine and an open field in this place.

Together with his brother and wife, Dmitry went to Latvia, to a village near Riga, where their relative was buried. Unfortunately, the map turned out to be true - at the site Dmitry found only a ditch, and only pieces of reinforcement marked the mass grave that had once been located here. After contacting the locals, the family learned that there were graves from the war in the village cemetery. However, no matter how they looked, there was no tombstone with the grandfather’s name among the graves.

Fortunately for Dmitry, one farmer remembered that in the 60s the authorities reburied the remains of the victims in a memorial cemetery in a neighboring city. Having gone to the indicated place, the family discovered a well-kept necropolis, where more than 2,000 liberating soldiers lie in mass graves. The names of almost all of them are known and inscribed on tombstones.

At first the search did not bring any results. But once again looking at the long list of buried soldiers, it turned out that the grandfather lies right here - during the reburial, the surname was transliterated into Latvian and back, and an error crept into the inscription on the memorial.

You might be interested:

Contact the funeral service. If the obituary lists the funeral service and not the burial location, try contacting them. Many funeral homes keep burial records, and the staff may be able to tell you exactly where a person is buried.

• If you only know the city in which the person was buried, try calling funeral services in that region.
• Start with the most famous companies and gradually narrow your search.

Talk to family members. Again, family members can be an important source of information. They may be able to direct you to the location of the burial and also show you the grave. If you are not a family member, this may be the best option for searching for a person's grave, especially if you have a reason for doing so, such as research purposes.

Use genealogy and virtual cemetery sites. These websites are designed to help you discover your story. They can help you find a person's grave, and they may even have photographs of the burial site uploaded to the site, since many people dedicate themselves to documenting cemeteries. You can try entering queries such as “Find Burial”, “Ancestral Search” and “Search Cemeteries” into an Internet search engine.

Try searching local sites. In some regions, sites are being created to search for graves. Yes, such sites may not have as much information as a state-level site, but it’s still worth a try. You will need: date of birth, date of birth, full name.

Check the burials of family members. If you can't find the information you need, one way to find the person you're looking for is to search family burial plots. You may come across a grave simply by searching in the same areas where his family members are buried.

Search for veterans on their dedicated website. Many of them are buried in the veterans' cemetery. Such sites keep records and track the burial places of all veterans. You can try several sites (if they are available in your area). For an effective search you will need: the deceased's full name, date of birth, date of death and rank.