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I volunteer for FG, going out to take pictures today (woohoo!!). It's a lot better than the competitor, billiongraves.com, which has the fantastic model of "one person takes a picture" and then "another person tries to decipher what is on the stone". However it's easy for anyone to make corrections on BG, not so on FG.
My favorite memorial on FG is for "unknown" name, "unknown" birth and death dates, no burial info, no photo, no family connections. There are several like this. Someone was padding their numbers.
Report the memorials if you remember where to find them.
I've tried to find people on billion graves but they weren't entered. There's already find a grave, why do we need another site?
I use both. A number of times, if I can’t find it on Findagrave, it’s on Billion.
Sometimes, it’s on neither.
I've been on find a grave almost 10 years. I've done trees for some memorials just to hook them with family. I'm not going to volunteer any time to billion graves and start over.
Find a Grave is awesome. I wish we had more quality sites like that. And yes, it's not just about gravestones. I'd have to wonder about any naysayers and grumps complaining about it.
I agree it is an excellent resource, but I fall short of calling it awesome. It all comes down to who is managing a particular memorial since they control what appears on the site. Often they are related to the deceased and scrupulous about what is posted. In too many situations, however, the manager is simply someone who reads the obituary sections of numerous papers and creates memorials, never to think about them again.
Anyone can submit a recommended correction. The manager can accept it or decline it, without any regard to whether the correction is accurate or not. If they ignore the recommendation long enough (21 days, I think), it is automatically approved. Some of the information I have come across on FindAGrave for my ancestors would be laughable except that the errors then begin appearing in family trees on Ancestry and eventually become "facts".
I've been a volunteer for about 12 years but realize it is a 2-edged sword requiring zero proof and lacking any documentation whatsoever. It can be a very useful tool, but it can also promulgate erroneous information throughout the realm of amateur genealogists.
Find A Grave can be a helpful site, but keep in mind that the information comes from the general public posting it on the site. The website administrators are not responsible for ensuring the information is correct. I have picked up useful information from there, but I have also found many horrendous errors. In most cases, the person who created the memorial is receptive to making corrections, but there are others who slap them up there in a frenzy to have more memorials than anybody else, and could care less whether they are correct or not.
If you find new information on Find A Grave regarding your family, I highly recommend you treat it as a hint and verify it from other sources, before accepting it as gospel facts. Happy hunting!
My biggest issue with FG is that people treat it like a family tree, but there's no option to add source citations like a tree. So it basically winds up being something like a crowd sourced tree like Wikitree, but without any documentation to back it up. Sometimes people add documents as photos, and sometimes people add a transcription of a record to the bio, but that's a clunky was to add a true citation, and lots of people don't bother.
If someone has added a clear image of the gravestone, that's the only info I take away from it. Of course, I keep in mind that even a gravestone can be wrong, but at least it's an original source, and not conjecture from another researcher. Everything else, any data that's not on the gravestone, especially the relationship links, is no different from unsourced data on other people's trees. If someone has added documentation, you should find and verify those documents yourself, just like you would with someone else's tree.
At the very least, FG should require known burial data to add a profile to the site. I'm so sick of seeing people added to FG with "unknown" for the burial info. What's the point? It's Find A Grave, not Find An Ancestor. It's supposed to be an online database of burials.
Findagrave is news? Many here are members, no doubt. I've been an active member for over 10 years.
Welcome to the site, but be sure to verify what's there. I've sorted out many a mess created by people who don't have the logic or analytical skills to do genealogy accurately. And about 942 CE . . .
Real records often don't go beyond about the 1500s and then in only a few locations. Most areas of the world don't even reach that far. I can safely vouch that any "records" to 942 CE are purely fictional.
Findagrave is news? Many here are members, no doubt. I've been an active member for over 10 years.
Welcome to the site, but be sure to verify what's there. I've sorted out many a mess created by people who don't have the logic or analytical skills to do genealogy accurately. And about 942 CE . . .
Real records often don't go beyond about the 1500s and then in only a few locations. Most areas of the world don't even reach that far. I can safely vouch that any "records" to 942 CE are purely fictional.
That 942 CE number is used a lot for saying the name was more likely different in origin. I had enough to use it for it to be very accurrate but for a couple I checked obit news clippings where that odd family name came from two different ones in Indiana and one family was entirely murdered by a son and the other a shipping tycoon. In my family it can go either way.
To this day my mom always believed her little baby brother died of crib death. Through that site and connected to something else - boy was she off.
There was also my grandfather and his brother who were raised in an orphanage here after the mother died. We tried orphanage records but it was so odd to never hear of my grandfather's brother - he never had one.
My aunt got royally busted lying her drama ass off to me. "OH and she fell right over in the front seat in he driveway here (FL) right on me and died." She died in a hospital in Indiana and the other never went.
My father's middle name is odd so when I saw it connected to a historic family here I started snooping around.
I landed on this strange site called 'Find a Grave" there's no charge for it and the information is so detailed and vast.
I looked up my great grandfather on my father's side. Sure enough there was his big ass monument and then all the relatives around in a photo.
But there was way more. It listed both his parents and also the mother's maiden name. It listed the wife and maiden name, all their children and if remarried the next wife and their children and all of them have birth and death dates and children who married and to who and you have to stay focused or you'll go all over so I staid strickly on the father's side going backward with his father and so forth and all the way to 942 CE and places of birth and death and name changes.
I was shocked how much detail and photos and names and how accurate it is.
And find a grave really only can verify the grave. I have a set of great grandparents and both of their headstones are wrong. I have no idea what anybody was drinking when they bought the headstones.
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???
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Solly says — Be nice!
