Web site locates graves in Utah

Today is Memorial Day, and many people would like to decorate the graves of relatives or ancestors — but cannot remember exactly where they are buried.

The Utah Division of State History offers an easy solution: a searchable Web site that can quickly tell where 605,931 people are buried in 365 Utah cemeteries.

And believe it or not, officials say it is fast becoming one of the state's most popular online services. The site — history.utah.gov/apps/burials/execute/searchburials — had 2.9 million hits over the past 12 months, more than one for every Utah resident.

"I even tried it," said Philip F. Notarianni, director of the Division of State History. "Mount Calvary Cemetery, the Catholic cemetery next to the Salt Lake City Cemetery, is where my parents are buried. We just went online a month ago with information from it, and I found my parents' names there."

The state has been collecting burial information for nine years and putting it online cemetery by cemetery as it becomes available. Other recent additions, for example, include the Orem, Fairview, Milton, Millville-Nibley and Bingham cemeteries.

Linda Thatcher, coordinator of the project, said data is now online for about two-thirds of the 550 known cemeteries in the state (active and inactive), and the state is working to add the rest, as well as regularly update data from new burials.

The project began in 1997 with an appropriation from the Legislature to help celebrate the 150th anniversary of the arrival in Utah of the Mormon pioneers, she said.

"That money ended, but the service has become so popular that we've used some of our discretionary money to keep it going," Notarianni said.

On the Web site, visitors can search by name for just one individual or choose to generate a list of everyone buried in Utah with the same surname. They can even obtain lists of all burials at one cemetery.

They do not need to know beforehand in what cemetery or even what city their relatives are buried to find them. Visitors may also obtain driving directions online to cemeteries and plot numbers for individuals they are seeking.

The database often includes family-history information beyond what is on headstones, too, such as listings of parents or other relatives, death causes and cities where they were born or died, along with key dates.

"That's because our information comes from sextons' records rather than from gravestones," so it often contains more that what visitors would see at cemeteries, Thatcher said.

A fan of the Web site is Salt Lake City Cemetery sexton Mark Smith. He notes it is often difficult for people visiting there to remember where relatives' plots are among its vast 250 acres and 120,000 graves.