Where the listings come from
The directory currently holds 179,777 cemeteries. Each one starts from one of two public sources:
- USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). The federal gazetteer records the official name, coordinates and county of cemeteries across the country, including tens of thousands of small family and rural burial grounds. GNIS data is in the public domain.
- OpenStreetMap. Volunteer mappers add addresses, websites, phone numbers, religious affiliation, founding dates and heritage listings. OpenStreetMap data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database License.
Where a cemetery appears in both, we match them by the GNIS feature ID that many OpenStreetMap objects carry, or by an identical normalized name within a few hundred meters. The federal record supplies the location; OpenStreetMap supplies the details.
Notable burials
The notable burials on cemetery and state pages come from Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia, which is released under CC0. We take every person whose Wikidata entry names a US cemetery as their place of burial and match that cemetery to our listing by its Wikidata ID or its GNIS feature ID. Cemeteries we cannot match that way are left out rather than guessed. Names, birth and death years and the one-line descriptions are shown as Wikidata records them, and each name links to Wikipedia or to the Wikidata entry so you can check the source. The list covers people with an encyclopedia entry, not every grave, and we do not publish plot locations.
The themed lists, such as presidents or Civil War veterans, use further Wikidata statements on the same people: occupation, offices held, awards received, conflicts taken part in and military branch. A person joins a list only when one of those statements says so.
Population, deaths and funeral homes
The comparisons on state and county pages and in the comparison tooluse the US Census Bureau's Vintage 2024 population estimates (population and estimated deaths in 2024) and land areas from the 2020 Census Gazetteer files, both in the public domain. Funeral homes, cremation providers and monument dealers come from our sister directory, Funeral Home Directory USA, which builds on Overture Maps and OpenStreetMap. We only include a business when its name says what it is (funeral home, mortuary, cremation, monuments and similar), so a few real providers are left out rather than listing offices or unrelated places by mistake.
How we classify cemeteries
We assign a type, religious affiliation or service only when the source says so. A cemetery is listed as Catholic when its record carries a Catholic denomination or its official name says “Catholic”; we never infer it from a saint's name. A cemetery counts as historic when it has a heritage designation, a historic tag, or a recorded establishment year before 1900. When we don't know, the page says “Not available”. See all cemetery types for the rule behind each category.
Cities and counties
Counties come from the federal record or from Census county boundaries. Many rural cemeteries have no mailing address, so we list them under the nearest populated place and say so on the page. The map pin always shows the recorded location.
Duplicates
The same cemetery can be recorded more than once, as “St. Mary's Cemetery” in one source and “Saint Mary Cemetery” in another. We merge records automatically only when they are certainly the same place. Uncertain matches go to a review queue and stay separate until a person checks them.
Corrections and verification
Every listing has a correction form. Cemetery staff, families and researchers can suggest changes, and we review each one before publishing. A listing shows “Verified” only after its details have been confirmed. Always confirm hours, burial availability and prices directly with the cemetery.
What we do not publish
- Ratings or reviews we cannot attribute to a real visitor.
- Descriptions or histories that are not supported by a source.
- Records of individual burials, until we have a reliable source for them.