When People Die: What the Dates on Gravestones Show

A death date on one headstone matters to one family. Put hundreds of thousands of them together and you can see more deaths in winter than in summer, and spikes in 1918 and 1945.

EveryStone holds about 598,000 public grave records, most of them in Slovakia, Czechia, the United Kingdom, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Lithuania and the Nordic countries. Almost all carry a year of death, and about 404,000 also carry the month. We counted them by month and by year.

More deaths in winter

To compare months of different lengths, we divided each month's deaths by its number of days and set the average to 100. We used 355,085 graves with a full date of death between 1900 and 2025. We left out war cemeteries, the war and epidemic years 1914-1920 and 1939-1946, and 2020-2021, so that they would not distort an ordinary year.

Deaths per day in each month, indexed to 100. December to March in gilt. EveryStone archive, 1900-2025.

The pattern holds in every country we checked. From December to March, 12% more people died per day than from April to November. February was the highest month and August the lowest, with a gap of about 20% between them. The United Kingdom shows the sharpest swing: a winter excess of 20%, with January and February far above the summer months. Slovakia peaks in December and has a winter excess of 11%. In Ukraine the curve is flatter at 9%, and October and November already run above average.

National statisticians see the same thing in death registrations. The Office for National Statistics writes that in England and Wales, as in other countries, more people die in winter than in summer. Most of those extra winter deaths fall on people aged 75 and over, and in the winter that bulletin examined, respiratory disease caused the largest share. Our headstone dates show the same winter rise as the registers, so we treat them as sound enough to count.

Professor Vladimir Orlovsky, died 6 February 1914 "in his 72nd year", Lukianivske Cemetery, Kyiv.

A century of death dates

Counting graves by year of death is harder, because the count rises for reasons that have nothing to do with mortality. Populations grew, and recent stones survive while many older graves were cleared, reused or marked only with wood. Volunteers photograph what still stands. So our archive holds about 530 graves of people who died in 1900 and more than 9,000 for most years between 2000 and 2013.

Graves in the EveryStone archive by year of death, 1900-2025 (581,787 graves). Military and war cemeteries in gilt.

The two world wars still stand out on top of that slope. The count for 1918 is 2,013, almost three times the 741 for 1913. The count for 1945 is 6,530, more than twice the 2,797 for 1946. The drop at the right edge reflects the archive itself: photographs and registers take years to catch up, so the newest graves are missing.

War cemeteries hold only 6,523 of the graves dated 1900-2025, about 1%. Yet they hold 483 of the 1918 graves and 1,387 of the 1945 graves. A soldiers' cemetery fills in a few years, so it adds a sharp spike to the war years. We drew those graves in gilt above and left them out of everything that follows.

Emil Lohrke, a reservist of Reserve Infantry Regiment 267, died 21 June 1915, Hlynsk Cemetery, Lviv Oblast.

Emil Lohrke's small white stone stands in a village cemetery in Lviv Oblast, with a grave number cut below the date. The same cemetery holds the infantryman Georg Lugauer, whose stone carries the same day.

Measuring a spike against the trend

To see how unusual a year was, we compared it with the years around it. For every year we took the 12 years before and after, left out the war and epidemic years, and fitted a smooth line through the rest. That line says how many graves an ordinary year of that time would have. Then we divided the real count by the line. A value of 1.0 is an ordinary year. A value of 2.0 means twice as many graves as expected. The chart uses civilian cemeteries only and stops at 2019, before the recent graves thin out.

Deaths in each year compared with the smoothed trend, civilian cemeteries only, 1900-2019.

Outside the wars, the line stays within about 7% of 1.0. It leaves that band twice. During the First World War civilian cemeteries held 15% to 29% more graves than expected, and 1918 rose to 1.7. During the Second World War the excess grew from 19% in 1940 to 1.7 in 1944 and 2.1 in 1945. Many of these are soldiers buried in town and village cemeteries near where they fell, along with civilians.

The autumn of 1918

Among 1,057 civilian graves from 1918 with a month of death, 320 fall in October and November, 30% of the year in two months. In 1913 those two months held 15%, which is what you would expect. October and November 1918 had more than twice the deaths per month of the rest of that year.

That is the second wave of the influenza pandemic. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describe it as the highly fatal autumn wave of 1918 that caused most of the pandemic's deaths in the United States. Headstones rarely name a cause of death, but the timing across hundreds of stones points to influenza. The ages point the same way. Of the autumn 1918 graves with an age, 45% belong to people aged 20 to 39. In 1912-1913 that age group made up 18% of the graves.

Left: Alexander Karpeka (1894-1918), died 13 November 1918 aged 24, Lukianivske Cemetery, Kyiv. Right: Władysław Ralko (1891-1918), died in October 1918 aged 27, Drohobych Cemetery.

The last spring of the war

In 1945 the excess sits in the spring. Of 3,207 civilian graves from 1945 with a month of death, 1,158 fall in March and April, 36% of the year. From June onwards the monthly count drops back to about 150, close to an ordinary year. In Germany, Poland and Czechia the peak falls between March and May, the last weeks of the war in Europe. The year before had already run 70% above the trend. On the stretch of wall in the photograph below, the dates run from late March to late May 1945.

Soldiers' names at Slavín, Bratislava, among them Private Nykolaenko (1914-1945), who died in April 1945.

2020 and 2021

COVID-19 should be the fourth spike, and in our archive it is the hardest to see. Most of our graves come from photographs taken years ago, so the pandemic years are thin in the overall count. We do not single out anyone who died in those years.

Age at death

The same dates give age at death for graves with both a birth and a death year. The average climbs by decade of death, with two dips that match the wars.

The table covers civilian cemeteries and only people who got a lasting stone. Children under five make up 8% of our graves from the 1900s, a small share for an age when many children died young, so the early averages run older than life expectancy at birth.

The dates in the archive

You can browse the graves behind these counts in the EveryStone archive, cemetery by cemetery, and search for a name and its two dates.