ROOTS & BRANCHES

I wrote in “Roots & Branches” two weeks ago—in the first of what now has become three columns on the website Find A Grave— “I continue to have difficulty wrapping my head around the psychology of someone who would be such a clod as to intrude on people’s grief by hastily putting up a memorial on Find A Grave.”

Well, the one thing I learned from the experience of writing about Find A Grave is that I no longer have difficulty wrapping my head around this.

Before I follow up on that statement, though, I want to first make sure no one doubts that I’m grateful to the many Find A Grave volunteers who have photographed tombstones and graves to give others the opportunity to witness (in a virtual way) the final resting spot of an ancestor, relative or other person in which they’re interested.

While some of these volunteers work in response to requests for photographs, many just do this with no motivation other than the “common good” of making the information available. Often they receive no thank you at all for their time-consuming efforts.

When I think back to my first days as a genealogist in the 1980s—when, if you were lucky, you might come across a written transcription of a particular cemetery’s tombstones in a genealogy library—it makes me smile at how relatively easy it can be for today’s genealogists to browse millions of graves from their computer desktops (not to mention laptops, iPads or phones!).

For all these reasons, I’m hopeful that Find A Grave continues to be a growing source of information to be used by genealogists.

But these columns showed what others had found to be true (and that I kept mightily trying to dismiss) about a certain minority of hard-core Find A Grave people.

A couple of commenters were downright bullies in the way they want to beat people over the head with Find A Grave’s “rules,” as well as excusing the activities of those who ingest online obituaries and spit them back as Find A Grave memorials within hours of a person’s decease.

One of my correspondents was rudely told not to share my column on a Facebook page related to Find A Grave.

But perhaps the most interesting encounter was with a Find A Graver whose final comment to me was: “So, you are of the same ilk as Judy Russell: don’t contradict me!!”

I don’t think she intended the comparison with The Legal Genealogist to be a compliment.

But that’s how I’m taking it.