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FindaGrave is owned by ancestry. As is newspapers.com now.
Edits are simple on findagrave. Dealing with some of the people.. Sometimes not so much. I personally think they should have a rule that non-family must wait at least a week to post a memorial. My grandmother was added 15 minutes after she died.
I dislike their habit of changing rules around. Now, I understand why they now allow multiple surnames in the event that someone was married multiple times.. Because they've now fixed the search where it will find them. Previously, if you had the last name as Doe Williams, for example.. Searching for Williams returned nothing.
The rule about punctuation in fields, other than a period or hyphen.. That was a good rule. Now we have people putting middle names with quotes around them. Not nicknames, which it does automatically, but middle names, if someone went by that name.
I don't know if the android app update has gone live yet.. I'm beta on that.. I think people will be upset by the new date entry. They went to a 'rolling' date entry on it. So, to enter 1950, you have to roll the first part of the year back to 19 and then roll the second half forward to 50, where previously, you could touch it and key it in.
All in all, it's a very good site with a few problems. The entries are only as good as the people making them. Too many times people are just there for the numbers. I only add memorials that i'm standing in front of. and I GPS tag and photograph everything. I just mow rows.
But, few volunteers in an area.. Or areas without volunteers who are boots on the ground mowing rows mean poor coverage. I flew up to Chicago a few weeks ago to find my great-great grandparents graves. There were two same-name cemeteries. I talked with a member who had documented one of them, because that person did one hell of a job. I picked up a few while I was there and transferred them over because I just thought they could take care of them better than I, since they were local. The other cemetery is.. Just friggin' huge and poorly documented. Of course, that's where my family was.
But.. If you're looking for someone in the upstate of SC.. Getting pretty well documented. I've gotten a number of emails thanking me for finding someone, even when there wasn't a request. They had no idea where a relative was and suddenly, my memorial popped up on their ancestry hints.
That's probably the biggest thing people don't realize. You might document 10000 graves and have 2 or 3 people tell you that you helped them. But, there's probably hundreds more that you've helped that you'll never know about.
My wife and I have been taking pictures for request for people on Find A Grave for several years. Also check out Random Acts of Geneological Kindness. https://raogk.org/
On raogk, we've gone to cemeteries, courthouses, libraries and other places around a couple states around here helping people.
Thanks for your help and service. It is appreciated!
Look up Lori Jane Eblin.. There's various stories out there on message boards that tell the entire story.. But.. Solved a missing persons case with FindaGrave.
Just.. Dumb luck. I went searching for things and found her. After.. Let's see, it's been a little over 3 years now.. I'm still annoyed that it took so long to solve this. I kinda look at it as the fact that I was able to solve this so easily means that the police detectives weren't really doing their jobs very well.
I don't see what I did as anything special from a smarts standpoint. Very proud of doing it and helping the family so, special to me from that standpoint, and I do stay in touch with the family and I think it's special from their perspective, which I understand.. But, I'm not like some kind of super genius for going down the path I did. You would THINK that the cops would have done this well before I did.
I have a love/hate relationship with Find-A-Grave. There are a lot of ghouls on that site who love to hoard memorials and refuse to correct their mistakes, even though you provide proof (i.e., an obit.) I have dozens of horror stories from Find-A-Grave.
Some of my favorites: Misspelled names. HOW?? HOW?? The name is spelled correctly on the headstone and you have a pic of it? Are you too dumb to read the headstone and spell it just as it appears in granite?
I fought with another guy--not even related to my family in any way--to correct the place of death on my great-uncle's listing. Twelve years later and it's still not fixed and he won't turn it over to any family member. I provided the loser with his obit and he refused to fix his screw up.
I could go on and on about the Find-A-Grave travesty.
My great grandparents or on find a grave, and it’s not find a graves fault, both of their headstones are wrong. On my great grandfathers his birth year is correct his death year is wrong. On my great grandmothers grave they just copied his, so both are wrong.
At this point no one knows the story of how this happened, my assumption is they didn’t have the money when these people died so at a later date they must’ve found the money and then couldn’t remember which is really remarkably sad. My great grandmother died in 1896 she’s listed as 1908.
The best I could do was to note as the first person leaving flowers, her correct date and also where I got it from so somebody else could find it.
The bad part is people think of headstones as accurate. And they aren’t. And the bad part of that is the fact that people don’t really look at the information that they’re adding, they just click that wretched leaf and there you go — this is now fact.
That 942 CE number is used a lot for saying the name was more likely different in origin.. . . ..
Not that I've heard of and I've been doing genealogy for myself and others for over 30 years.
Very strange. Seems odd to use a random year of a bygone ea to mean . . . anything. It is understood that all records eventually dead end, so no need to specify that. But to use an old year to mean something unrelated to time. Never heard that one.
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Originally Posted by Clemencia53
yes I was doing research today on a branch of my mom's family.
The gravestone has a birth year of 1923 of a female, but I found her birth record says 1919. What to do???
That can happen when people fudge their age. That's why it's almost always women and it's almost always to make them seem younger. Men may have exaggerated their age to join the military early before more careful record keeping, but some women get younger and younger once they hit middle age. Just sayin'.
Not that I've heard of and I've been doing genealogy for myself and others for over 30 years.
Very strange. Seems odd to use a random year of a bygone ea to mean . . . anything. It is understood that all records eventually dead end, so no need to specify that. But to use an old year to mean something unrelated to time. Never heard that one.
That can happen when people fudge their age. That's why it's almost always women and it's almost always to make them seem younger. Men may have exaggerated their age to join the military early before more careful record keeping, but some women get younger and younger once they hit middle age. Just sayin'.
I think, and I could be wrong, back in the day people were a bit more loosey-goosey with dates and names. I have grandparents who were born and given names, and when they died their names had flipped. As in for example Marilyn Monroe‘s original name was Norma Jean, but if she had been my grandmother she would’ve died Jean Norma.
And I have an aunt who everywhere I can find on everything was born in 1914. I could not find her birth certificate. I ended up going to the Pennsylvania archives and searching year-by-year to find out that she wasn’t born in 1914 she was born in 1913. There was another reason it didn’t pop up — I was looking for Norma Jean Baker (same example) and apparently they struggled to name her, so her birth certificate was issued no name Baker. So, no name, wrong year, wasn’t popping up.
Usually, when a child isn’t named immediately, which has happened in my family, the birth certificate is amended with no name lined out and Norma Jean written on top.
That and I honestly think that no one is fact checking the headstones, they assume if you’re purchasing something you’re giving them the right information.
I think, and I could be wrong, back in the day people were a bit more loosey-goosey with dates and names.
Definitely, though varies by where and when. If people were focused on survival they were less likely to preserve dates or have a means to do so or in some cases records were destroyed by fires, floods or wars.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallysmom
I have grandparents who were born and given names, and when they died their names had flipped. As in for example Marilyn Monroe‘s original name was Norma Jean, but if she had been my grandmother she would’ve died Jean Norma.
I've seen that too, especially in one branch where almost everyone switched their first and middle names. No idea why.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallysmom
And I have an aunt who everywhere I can find on everything was born in 1914. I could not find her birth certificate. I ended up going to the Pennsylvania archives and searching year-by-year to find out that she wasn’t born in 1914 she was born in 1913. There was another reason it didn’t pop up — I was looking for Norma Jean Baker (same example) and apparently they struggled to name her, so her birth certificate was issued no name Baker. So, no name, wrong year, wasn’t popping up.
Usually, when a child isn’t named immediately, which has happened in my family, the birth certificate is amended with no name lined out and Norma Jean written on top.
Yes, it pays to look at a range of years. One of my pet peeves is not naming a kid on his/her birth certificate. It's not like they didn't know that day would come. But I've wondered if it was them or doctors who couldn't be bothered when I've seen it happen on a widespread basis then improve as practices improved.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallysmom
That and I honestly think that no one is fact checking the headstones, they assume if you’re purchasing something you’re giving them the right information.
Right because even though it really is "written in stone" it is a private purchase of what amounts to a sort of decoration. Anyone can put anything on that stone if they're willing to pay for it and a monument company is willing to produce it.
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Solly says — Be nice!
Not that I've heard of and I've been doing genealogy for myself and others for over 30 years. 
Never heard that one. 
