A more modern-looking Find A Grave website has been released, although for now it is a beta site to test functionality, while the old site continues to run.
While some regular contributors to Find A Grave are struggling with some of the new features and ways of doing thing, the beta site provides some improvements that will be welcomed by many.
New Find A Grave home page is clean and modern-looking.
Improved search feature
The biggest improvement for genealogists looking for cemeteries outside the United States is you can now search by town or city in other countries. In Canada, for example, searches for Whitehorse, Grande Prairie, Montreal, and Lunenburg all produced a list of cemeteries.
On the old site, you can only narrow down your location by country, with the exception of the US where you can search by state.
The new Find A Grave search feature makes it easy to search for gravesites around the world.
Upload multiple photos at once
On the new version, you can add a group of headstone photos to Find A Grave using a new upload tool available on the cemetery page. You can also preview, rotate, and delete images from the photos you upload.
Find A Grave is only available in English, but it appears plans are underway to provide French, Spanish, Portuguese, and something they call French Canadian.
Technical snags
While they work out the technical issues, it is probably best to upload memorials, transcriptions, and photos to the original version. Some people have complained that photos they uploaded did not appear on the new version.
When Ancestry acquired Find A Grave in 2013, it announced plans to “bolster the resources dedicated to Find A Grave to launch a new mobile app, improve customer support, introduce an enhanced edit system for submitting updates to memorials, foreign-language support, and other site improvements.”
The new site can be found from the original site by clicking on See a preview now.
The original Find A Grave website looks cluttered and dated.
Glad to see the new Find A Grave will include searchability by state, province or other small geopolitical units in other countries as well, now–although that work-around you publicized for the Canadian cemeteries a while back was certainly helpful!