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memorial day
A family visits a cemetery to pay their respects to someone who has passed on.© 2024 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.In the United States, the Memorial Day national holiday encourages people to remember ancestors and deceased loved ones. Tools provided through FamilySearch can help you locate memorials and learn more about your relatives.
Promises for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who involve themselves in family history work are great:
“It is breathtakingly amazing that, through family history and temple work, we can help to redeem the dead,” said Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. “But as we participate in family history and temple work today, we also lay claim to ‘healing’ blessings promised by prophets and apostles” (“Family History and Temple Work: Sealing and Healing,” April 2018 general conference).
For those visiting physical memorials this Memorial Day, a 2023 FamilySearch blog post outlines two web tools you can use to find relatives in their burial place and learn more about the people at cemeteries you visit.
Find a Cemetery or Monument
The first tool includes a database of over 300,000 cemeteries, monuments and memorial sites across the world. Use this feature to find a list of people connected to a particular site, as well as see photos, records, memories and biographies for them. If you have a family tree on FamilySearch, you can also see if any of your relatives are buried there.
Download PhotoSee a List of Cemeteries Your Relatives are Buried In
The second tool allows you to see a list of your relatives buried near a location you select using a map or a search bar. More information about each relative is quickly available with a click of a button. You can view memories shared already and upload your own memories of your relative.
Specific locations of headstones and individual memorials can be found through Find a Grave and BillionGraves websites.
The FamilySearch.org Family History Activities section also provides new opportunities to discover familial connections. One activity honors the original intent of Memorial Day to celebrate fallen soldiers by highlighting each of the military members in your family tree. Other features allow you to find obituaries, read missionary calls and journals, and track your relatives through Church history and other important historical events.
During a presentation at the 2017 Rootstech conference with President Russell M. Nelson, Sister Wendy Nelson said, “I entreat you to make a sacrifice of time to the Lord by increasing the time you spend doing temple and family history work, and then watch what happens. It is my testimony that when we show the Lord we are serious about helping our ancestors, the heavens will open and we will receive all that we need.”