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ROOTS & BRANCHES

Written By: James M. Beidler

the BLOG

Vol. MMXXIVDecember 21, 2024

Competitive Find A Grave lacks compassion

Published October 20, 2019

| 17 Comments  | Leave A Reply

There are likely few genealogists who don’t know about the Ancestry.com-owned website Find A Grave, which started as a way for people to share inscriptions from and photos of, well, graves … gravestones, in particular.

But a not so funny thing has happened on the way to the website becoming a sort of “one stop shopping” for all sorts of recordings of death, including obituaries.

Individuals create memorial pages for people who have passed on, which seems pretty innocuous, right?

And so it is except a competition has begun among those who create the memorial pages—who can do the most, who can create them the fastest.

Which again seems like something that all genealogists should be in favor of.

Except that the people creating the memorials sometimes are folks who have no relationship or knowledge of the deceased.

Including deceased for whom family might have wanted to be the one to post the memorial … after an appropriate amount of grieving time, instead of within hours of death as some Find A Grave contributors do.

A recent thread on The Legal Genealogist Judy G. Russell’s Facebook page showed some of the passions involved from family members who feel anger at such actions.

One called those who quickly harvest death notices to create Find A Grave memorials “obituary vultures.”

 Russell herself says she calls them “Find A Grave robbers.”

I chimed in on the conversation that I continue to have difficulty wrapping my head around the psychology of someone who would be such as clod as to intrude on people’s grief by hastily putting up a memorial on Find A Grave.

Many people also chimed in, including prominent blogger Amy Johnson Crow. Russell and Crow led a chorus on the thread asking Ancestry.com do something about this problem.

“At a minimum asking someone to represent that he or she is related within a specified degree and booting that person and every one of his/her statistics (not memorials but the credits for them) if found to have lied would be a good start,” Russell said.

Crow had a related idea. “If one of the steps is to click that you state that you’re a close relative, then all Ancestry has to do is suspend accounts that create multiple recent-death memorials at once,” she wrote. “Nobody has that many close relatives dying every day. Would it prevent it? No, but it would slow it down.”

On the one hand, Find A Grave is such a great, crowd-sourced tool that I hate to see it slowed down.

But on the other hand, I lived through the recent, unexpected death of a high school classmate, and I see someone has seen fit in their haste to post the first, incomplete version of his obituary on Find A Grave.

And that has me agreeing that the Find A Grave train has gone off the tracks.

17 Comments

  1. John C Vander Meulen

    5 years ago  

    It is disappointing when this happens. As a FAG (Find-A-Grave) contributor for the last 2.5 years, I find the site to be a great place to memorialize my ancestors for future generations. It has also aided me in my genealogy research. True, there are also FAG hobbyists who visit cemeteries to take photos of headstones, the deceased of which they do not know, for posting on FAG. This should be done with respect for the dead and as a good-faith gift gesture to any living relatives. In such cases, I have no problem when such hobbyists create the FAG memorial page should one not already exist. I am grateful to such hobbyists who transferred memorials of my family members to me without hesitation.

    • James Beidler

      5 years ago  

      Absolutely, John, and I didn’t mean to throw the “baby out with the bath water” … I’m going to run a follow column in a week or two clarifying that any restriction on non-family members should be for just a reasonable amount of time after death …

  2. Marji Wright

    5 years ago  

    Find a Grave could have been so much better but in the rush to have the most memorials, too many people who never bothered to learn anything about transcription and validating sources have turned it into a joke, in many instances. In addition, some transcribers have seen fit to recreate the genealogical history, which really should be the province of the descendants.
    Obvious errors, fictitious “records”, leaving major portions of the stone without transcription, using the site as a message board and requests for correction which are answered by “I’m too busy to correct errors,” (this was an actual response to my question about an error) have turned it into a third rate and unreliable place to go for records. Then to have someone try to decipher a bad photograph (which many are) in an attempt to transcribe it, diminishes the profession of genealogy.
    It’s a shame they cared so little about something that really meant a lot to the descendants.
    In the meantime, all they can do is brag about themselves.
    I have transcribed thousands of records of all kinds.
    marji

    • James Beidler

      5 years ago  

      Thanks for your comments, Marji! I congratulate diligent folks such as yourself and am sorry more aren’t like yourself!

  3. Phyllis Adamson

    5 years ago  

    Perhaps we could tale a lesson from FaG Canada. People go thru cemeteries creating memorials for the people buried there. But they leave the DOB & POB as “unknown” and the DOD as either just the year or the full date if listed on the headstone. No other details are added. But when a family researcher ID’s their relative they can submit that data to be added, along with links to relatives in that cemetery.
    Just a thiught.

  4. Diane LaMonica

    5 years ago  

    I contribute to find a grave, I appreciate the people on find a grave, People send me grave photo requests & I do it , Some of the people asking , want to pay respects to a grave they have never seen or visited. people have told me their concerns about Identity theft, with the list of siblings & finding maiden names & things, but my info is from already published stories, I enjoy my gerontology & several family members have been cremated and I want them remembered too so I’ve done memorials for them. As for me, I do it out of Love & respect & the wonderful memories I have of them, I want future generations to be able to find them if they want to. The people I’ve started memorials for are more than just names, and date of Birth, they are wonderful people, Many with Wonderful stories, that a headstone alone can never express. I’m so glad to be able to contribute stories about my close loved ones, I wish more people could have known them, It’s a shame that people can take something innocent & take it to the wrong side. For my part it’s done out of Love & the desire to see wonderful people remembered.

  5. Pat Noble

    5 years ago  

    The way to resolve this is to have Find-a-Grave offer pages for typed obituaries like they do for images, then reserve the memorials for memorials. What you’re facing is a valid crowd sourcing effort to add obituaries. Why not direct that energy rather than criticize and quash it? There are many Find-a-Grave pages with no memorials after many years. Current graves will more often than not become long forgotten pages as well if we don’t have dedicated obituary trackers adding that information. Changing the platform to allow memorials separate from obituaries would be a good start. Seems to me that is something Ancestry should work on.

    As for me, I would like some distinction made between what is on the gravestone and what is the result of research or family knowledge. As a genealogist and an Ancestry user, I find it frustrating to land on a Find-a-Grave site with full names, maiden names, etc, dates and places of birth, marriage and death, only to find the stones yield quite a bit less information. This is especially a problem when no photograph is available. What is the source of all this additional information? I have to source it to Find-a-Grave, but it is actually an assortment of sources of variable reliability or even mistakes. I fix what I can along the way. I have come to appreciate the additional information as a finding tool, but it is frustrating to have to document the head stone separately because who the heck knows where the site got the information that has “augmented” the memorial.

    Oh, and to top it off, genealogy buffs using Ancestry are taking Social Security Death Index “residence at the time of death” data and using it as place of death, and that information is making its way into Find-a-Grave. I’ve complained to Ancestry’s Barefoot Genealogist about how Ancestry mistakenly uses the residence at time of death and plugs it into place of death, but she says it is the users’ responsibility to sort that out. I’d advise your readers who use Ancestry to be mindful of this difference: If your relative died in a hospital in another town from where the Social Security check usually arrived, that death place will be wrong in Ancestry’s SSDI offering. I routinely remove the place of death data from SSDI records and re-enter it as place of residence using the month and year of death.

    Sorry for the long reply.
    countless family tree preparers are taking Find-a-Grave records and plugging them into their trees unchecked

  6. Mary Langsdorf

    5 years ago  

    I’ve been to genealogy conference classes with findagrave people. They informed me to contact them at anytime to request taking over a memorial of one of my relatives. An acquaintance of my dad did his memorial. I requested the person several times to turn it over to me with no response so find a grave turned it over to me. They have been great about turning memorials over to me a non relative created with no problem.

  7. Yvonne

    5 years ago  

    I am so grateful that I have been a contributor since Find a Grave started. I added all of my ‘people’ then. It seems like the ‘vultures’ are just waiting for people to die so that they can be added immediately. Family members that are Find a Grave contributors have to enter the family member before they are even cold, to beat the vultures. I do wish that something could be done about it?

  8. Jan Didawick

    5 years ago  

    I can’t stand the new Find A Grave Webpage. The old one was so much user-friendly. But I am glad there is someplace to go when doing research on family members and I am glad there is a page when we can memorialize the family members that we have lost.

  9. Tony Fleming

    5 years ago  

    The tide of opinion on this has definitely shifted. For years, I politely suggested we could all wait a few months to let the family have time to grieve, perhaps working to add the thousands of older, unmemorialized graves out there in the meantime. The hostility was palpable. Usually, I was told that what they were doing was perfectly within the rules so I should shut up, or I’d get a timeout from a Facebook group. That’s when I stopped being nice about it. lol!

    I eventually created a Change.org petition to get the rules changes (http://chng.it/YN2cCZYc), which gathered a few signatures, but not many. I’m glad to see others took a more direct route and have gotten Ancestry/FaG to change the policies.

    Funny, all those “rules” people seem to have gotten very quiet lately.