Methodology
How cemetery information reaches this site, how it is labeled, and where its limits are.
What is covered today
The directory contains 333 sites, taken from the official cemetery listings of the VA’s National Cemetery Administration, retrieved November 11, 2026:
- National cemeteries: 166
- State, territorial and tribal veterans cemeteries: 125
- Soldiers’ lots: 21
- Confederate cemeteries: 7
- Monument sites: 2
- Other VA-listed sites: 12
The first five groups come from the VA’s list of national cemeteries, which also includes annexes, soldiers’ lots and similar small sites as separate entries. The state, territorial and tribal group comes from the VA’s list of grant-funded cemeteries.
What is not covered yet
- Arlington National Cemetery and other cemeteries managed by the Army.
- Overseas cemeteries of the American Battle Monuments Commission.
- National cemeteries managed by the National Park Service.
- State or local veterans cemeteries the VA does not list as grant-funded, if any exist.
- Private, religious and municipal cemeteries where veterans are buried.
- Individual burial records. The site links to the official locators instead of copying them.
- Hours and histories for state and tribal cemeteries, accessibility details, and photographs. These are shown as “Not yet verified” until each is checked.
Our count and the agency’s
The homepage quotes figures published by the agencies themselves, checked October 27, 2026: the VA describes 158 cemeteries as VA-managed and 125 as grant-funded. Our grant-funded count matches. Our national count is higher than 158 because the VA’s list gives annexes and separate plots their own entries, and we keep each entry as the VA lists it. We do not reconcile the numbers by guessing.
How records are imported
- The VA’s two list pages, and the VA’s own page for each national cemetery, are fetched once, one page at a time.
- A script converts each entry into a cemetery record. The same input always produces the same output.
- The import stops and asks for human review if the number of entries changes sharply.
- Every published page states its source and the retrieval date.
What is copied and what is derived
| Shown on the page | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Name, address, phone, fax, burial-space status, official web address | Copied from the VA’s list pages. |
| Visiting hours and office hours | Copied from the VA’s page for that cemetery (202 of 333 sites). State and tribal cemeteries set their own hours, which the VA does not list. |
| History, notable burials, flowers and grounds policy, general information | Reproduced word for word from the VA’s page for that cemetery, and labeled as the VA’s text (207 sites have a history). Formatting is simplified; the words are not changed. |
| Type of site (national cemetery, soldiers’ lot and so on) | Taken from which VA list the entry is on and from the words in its name. No history is inferred from it. |
| Map position | For 167 sites, coordinates in a VA open dataset. For 94, the street address placed by the U.S. Census Geocoder. For 72, the position the VA publishes through its Facilities API. Where two sources disagreed by more than two kilometres, the point nearer the centre of the site’s ZIP area was used and the record flagged for a manual check. 0 sites have no map point. |
| Distances in search results | Straight-line miles from the center of the ZIP code or city you enter (U.S. Census Bureau gazetteer), not driving distance. Where a site has no precise position, the center of its ZIP area is used for the distance only. |
Text reproduced from the VA
Works of the U.S. government are in the public domain. Where this site reproduces the VA’s description of a cemetery’s history or its list of notable burials, the passage is marked as the VA’s, linked to the page it came from, and dated. It has not been independently verified by this site, and it may have changed since it was retrieved. Names of notable individuals appear only because the VA publishes them on that cemetery’s page.
Burial space
“Open”, “Closed”, “Cremation Only” and “Under Construction” are the VA’s own terms, as listed on the retrieval date. Availability changes. The site shows the date beside the value and asks you to confirm with the cemetery.
Symbolic coins and visits
Each cemetery page lets a visitor leave a symbolic coin and privately mark the cemetery as visited. Coins are counted in total for each cemetery; no names or messages are collected. The tallies are a gesture of remembrance, not a measure of anything, and are never used to rank cemeteries. See coins on headstones.
Editorial standards
- Official primary sources come first; secondary sources are identified as such.
- Missing information is labeled “Not yet verified”, never “None”.
- No service record, rank, decoration or cause of death is assumed for any person.
- Software, including AI tools, may help organize drafts. It is not a source: every factual claim must trace to a cited record, and guides are marked as unreviewed until a person has checked them.
- Photographs are published only with verified rights and a credit. No synthetic images are presented as documentation.
Corrections
Anyone can report a correction. Reports are read by a person, checked against a source, and applied or declined. The submitter’s identity is never published.
See also the full list of data sources. Coordinates dataset: VA National Cemetery Sites (dataset).