The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs offers the Nationwide Gravesite Locator (http://gravelocator.cem.va.gov/) - a searchable database of the burial locations of “veterans and their family members in VA National Cemeteries, state veterans cemeteries, various other military and Department of Interior cemeteries, and for veterans buried in private cemeteries when the grave is marked with a government grave marker.” The database “officially” covers deaths/burials since 1977, but older information may be reported/added to the database on an ad-hoc basis. (For example, we found a record in the database for a veteran whose death date was listed as “12/08/1891.” The database is updated each day.

You can search the database with as little as a partial last name. You can add additional criteria including:

·      First Name

·      Middle Name

·      Month/Year of Birth

·      Month/Year of Death

You can also limit results to just one of the more than 700 cemeteries listed on the search form’s drop-down menu or opt to search All of them.

The VA described the database as including “burial records from many sources. These sources provide varied data; some searches may contain less information than others. Information on veterans buried in private cemeteries was collected for the purpose of furnishing government grave markers…”