About the archive
A site for the final chapter
What this site is
Ancestors at Rest is a free archive of death-stage genealogy records — coffin plates, cemetery transcriptions, obituaries, funeral cards, parish registers, probate filings, and military death records. It exists to help genealogists locate, confirm, and understand the final records of their ancestors’ lives.
Unlike general genealogy platforms that focus on building family trees, this site sits at the terminal stage of research, where users are trying to close the loop on an individual: confirming a death date, locating a burial, or finding the records that document the end of a life.
Twenty years of stewardship
Ancestors at Rest was originally compiled by Brian, a death-records researcher who spent years assembling the collections of coffin plates, cemetery transcriptions, and burial indexes that became this site’s foundation.
Editorial stewardship was carried by the late Lorine McGinnis Schulze (1946–2022) of Olive Tree Genealogy, whose decades of genealogical work spanned Lost Faces, Past Voices, and a small network of independent archives this site is part of.
Current stewardship is held by Tyler Schulze, Lorine’s son, who continues the family’s work — adding records, verifying transcriptions, and re-indexing the archive for modern use.
What you’ll find here
Seven categories of primary-source death records, live and browsable today, organised by what they are. Most also surface by location — county cemetery transcriptions, state-level probate indexes, country-level military rolls — for genealogists working from a place rather than a name.
Records are free. They include date and place where preserved, the original artifact (image or transcription), and a citation block so you can record the source in your own research. Start with the records hub →
Contribute a record
The archive grows by contribution. If you have a coffin plate photograph, an obituary clipping, or a cemetery transcription, we’d like to add it.
Submit a record →