3 genealogy websites for tracing your ancestors' deaths

Finding your ancestor’s date of death and their grave is really important – to help you complete the full set of records, plan a trip to visit their final resting place, and ensure you have the final piece to the puzzle of their life.

It's rather ironic, but some of the most useful family history records to help us understand how our ancestors once lived are the documents that commemorated their deaths and remembrance.

As genealogist Chris Paton explains in his article in the November 2019 issue of Family Tree about how to trace the records of death, burial and cremation, the starting point in tracing a relative's demise is through the various civil registration systems across the United Kingdom – for more on this, read our useful article, Birth, marriage and death records for family tree research.

Chris outlines lots of sources to help you research deaths – and here are three of our favourite web resources.

1) FreeBMD

Search for your ancestors' death registrations in England and Wales for free here, and then use the General Register Office site to buy the certificates.

2) Deceased Online

Deceased Online has been digitising records from various burial and cremation authorities around the UK, including register records, maps and photographs, since 2009 (£).

3) FamilySearch

As well as access to some burial registers, FamilySearch provides access to FindaGrave and BillionGraves (or go directly to the sites), two online crowdsourcing platforms that encourage contributors to add grave photos and transcriptions of memorials, along with GPS data to help family history researchers locate the resting places of their relatives across the world.

• Read the full article, packed with multiple resources for researching your ancestors' deaths, in the November 2019 issue of Family Tree.

You may also find these articles helpful:

Grave matters – how and why to 'kill off' your ancestors

How to use death certificates in family history – 60-second video guide