Re-Posted from Help With Find-a-Grave forum, by request:

Original Subject: Canadian Cemeteries

[my reply to the original poster]
Kathy - as a fellow Canadian graver, I share your frustration about trying to narrow down Canadian entries by province (well over 5700 cemeteries in our little country north of their border, teehee). Although I've only been a member for a few short months, I'm aware that the remedy IS in the works, but like you I wish it could happen sooner. =])

In the meantime, an elegant solution was provided recently in the thread 'searching for churchyards in the uk' (a few question pages earlier from here). Took me a bit of time to re-find the details, but here's how the same tip can be used for Canada:

First, start with a search for all cemeteries in Canada - leave the cemetery name blank, and just choose "Canada" in the country field. As you probably know, this gets you 'into the country', with about 5,760 listings. ((For England, Find A Grave will complain there are way too many listings to display, but there's a work-around for that too if you need it)).

Now with the resulting list for Canada, take a look at the url in the address bar at the top of your browser. This is likely what you'll see:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=csr&CScn=&CScntry=10&CSst=0

Look across the url to the end portion that reads 'CSst=0'. This part of the code tells the browser to look for a specific 'state' (originally designed for USA searches). We simply hi-jack it to look for a Canadian 'state', by changing the '0' to one of the following numbers:

823 Alberta
830 Ontario
832 Quebec
824 British Columbia
825 Manitoba
833 Saskatchewan
826 New Brunswick
831 Prince Edward Island
829 Nova Scotia
827 Newfoundland & Labrador
834 Yukon
835 Northwest Territories
836 Nunavut

Of course, with Ontario there will still be over 2,500 cemeteries to search through, but that's nearly half fewer . . .

Then you can apply the tip for quickly skipping ahead by multiple screens of records [ . . go to the second page of listings, the end of the url with the 'state' number of 830 will now be followed by "&CSsr=21&" -- change the 21 to any multiple of 40 records you wish to guestimate, eg &CSsr=521& will skip you ahead to the screen with Ontario cemetery Records 521 to 540].

Once you've got the process downpat, it's easy to take short-cuts: got a list of all cemeteries in Ontario named United? Want to look at the same name in Alberta? Just change the 'state' code . . .

Btw, in the 'CScntry=10' part, 10 is the Country code for Canada. USA is 4, England is 5, and Barbados is 86. [There is _no_ #1, how diplomatic is that!! haha]. It was fun to experiment with the new toy -- briefly! =])

Clear as mud, right?
Cheers! =]) B

I just want to mention that the Ontario Cemetery Finding Aid is very helpful - for those buried in Ontario of course. http://www.islandnet.com/ocfa/

Thank you!

I have family in every province of Canada that borders on the USA.

They are VERY reluctant to post any data on Find-A-Grave, because there is no way to target a specific Province in searching. They can not see having to attempt to manipulate an address, in order to get to a specific Province.

It can not be that difficult to set this up so that once you click on "Canada", a screen that has each of the Provinces is available. This has long been the situation with the US, so why has it not already been done for Canada?

There are a LOT of American families that have Canadian branches. It would sure be helpful if someone would "accelerate" this project.

Does anyone know when this was added?

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/stateLookup.cgi?countryId=10

I don't think this is new, but I have no idea when it was added. But you only see this prompt after the cemetery has been listed without a province. Many contributors don't realize that it is only in step 2 that the province is added --as evidenced by the large number of cemeteries in Canada without a province.

I can search for Quebec cemeteries with the code 832 - but I am not going to see the ones that don't have Quebec in the location address.
I am now looking for cemeteries in the area I visit, so that I can plan a route and not find several days later that I was two minutes away from another cemetery. So I still need to search the Cemetery Lookup with A, Canada -- B, Canada and so on, and when I see a cemetery with no province, if I don't recognize the city, I have to Google it, to know the province. I can understand why some would find this not very user friendly for Canadian cemeteries. And then there's still that missing Request a Photo button!!
So, for the price I paid to join Find A Grave, even with my money presently at par, I think this is an excellent source for those with an interest in genealogy and graving.
(of course, just kidding about the price eh!! Find A Grave is FREE - what could be better? maybe free popcorn)

This information was really useful!
Thank you all!

The province codes have been very useful to me - but probably few contributors know that it is possible.

After Find A Grave added (around the end of Feb2012 I think)the missing province to the cemeteries, some of the cemeteries have ended up in the wrong province, because that particular city/town location was not added for that province.