The Find A Grave leopard hasn’t changed …
Ancestry, what are you waiting for?
It’s long past time to impose a permanent humane solution to the long-term, persistent, growing problem at Find A Grave: that people utterly unassociated with a recently-deceased person race the grieving family to be the first to create a memorial.
And, yes, it’s happened again to the family of one of our genealogical colleagues, and The Legal Genealogist has nothing to offer to comfort that family.
The genealogist’s cousin lost her husband after a terrible long illness. The morning the obituary appeared in the newspaper, she asked her cousin to create a Find A Grave entry that contained everything the family wanted — and nothing the family did not want.
Too late, of course.
Some stranger had already swooped in, scarfed up the information and created a memorial.
The cousin feels violated, the genealogist feels outraged, and Find A Grave … well, Find A Grave continues to do nothing. And its corporate owner, Ancestry, sits by and lets nothing continue to be done.
There was a brief moment, last fall, when it seemed as though perhaps the Find A Grave leopard might be willing to change its spots. It came after this blog and others had repeatedly highlighted the issue and called for a moratorium on allowing non-family members to post memorials to the site to give the families of the recently deceased time to come to terms with their loss and create their own memorial before an utter stranger is allowed to add a recent death to the website.1
In late October, 2019, a post in Find A Grave’s News & Announcements seemed to suggest that maybe — just maybe — Find A Grave was beginning to understand that it has a problem here. In the post, Memorials for the Recently Deceased, the site noted that the problem was “unusual”2 but conceded that it “can make a challenging time more difficult” when strangers post memorials for the recently deceased.3
It asked for reader input, but despite overwhelming support for the idea of a moratorium, the site closed comments on the post within just a few days — and then did nothing at all.
No, the leopard hasn’t changed its spots.
It’s pretty clear that particular leopard isn’t going to change its spots on its own.
Somebody has to step in and get it done.
Ancestry, what are you waiting for?
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “About those spots…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 6 Feb 2020).
SOURCES
- See e.g. Amy Johnson Crow, “How FindAGrave Could – and Should – Be Made Better,” Amyjohnsoncrow.com, posted 21 Oct 2016 (https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/ : accessed 6 Feb 2020), and Judy G. Russell, “A modest proposal,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 5 Aug 2019 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 6 Feb 2020). ↩
- Snort. The objective evidence shows it’s anything but unusual… ↩
- “Memorials for the Recently Deceased,” News & Announcements, Find A Grave (https://news.findagrave.com/ : accessed 6 Feb 2020). ↩
Thank you, Judy.
What gets me is their silence on the topic. Even the hardest hardcore site members refer back to the site’s FAQ section as their bible whenever there is a dust-up. “There is nothing in the site guidelines that prevent me from adding a memorial…” is their justification for not making the situation right. It would a go long way if the site would simply state: “Please refrain from adding recently deceased people that you are not related to for a 30 day period unless you can prove direct relationship if the listing is questioned.” THAT would end most of this ghoulish practice in many instances because the FAQ’s would spell it out. But all we get is silence.
Sigh… this seems to me to be such a no-brainer. NOBODY is asking the Find A Grave volunteers to do anything more than give the families a short grace period (and maybe they could use that grace period to walk a few real cemeteries and record a few more ancestral graves, for which we would all be exceedingly grateful). And yet just wait… the howls will start up any moment now.
Out the vultures on social media and crowd shame them. Ancestry is not going to help.
The simple solution to this problem can easily be solved. Ask the person who put the obituary on findagrave to transfer it to you. Then you can fix it the way you want it. I hope findagrave never honors the idea that only family members can add information when they want to. You are talking about ONE person added that offends a few family members, when 10000’s are added in a day and most family members who could care less about the site, the obit or genealogy or honoring the person by adding them to findagrave. The death information is published and usually put on the internet, so it does not belong to the family. If only family members can add the deceased person, findagrave would probably have very few names. Many people do not know about the site and never look at it, so they don’t have any idea about adding the names. Many funeral homes are adding names as well as dedicated persons who read the papers, etc. and I am thankful for every one of them.
When the exact episode (described above) happened to me, I asked for the memorial, so I can add information, etc. and it was given to me immediately. I am thankful for every name placed on findagrave and I have added 700 plus relatives and do not know one relative who would have done this, because none of them care. I have received many, many thanks for the persons I have posted, and people are especially thankful for the photos I have added. Sometimes I find in family albums—friend’s and ancestors information and pictures, so I add them. Also, I am thankful for the two persons who put all the obits, etc. on findagrave every day as soon as they are posted in our local paper. I sure don’t want to do it, nor do I have the time. Years ago, I wanted to add a genealogy friend’s husband, who was accomplished and had a history written about him and also had lots of great photos of him. She said that she wanted to do it. Five years later, she died, and I did it for her and at that time I added her husband with only dates added, because no one in her family is ever going to do it. So he is posted, but not honored like I honored her after she died. Every name, photo, obit., etc. I have added to findagrave I did it to HONOR the person who died, and did not do it to offend the family.
Judy, I couldn’t agree with you more. My uncle died recently. His widow and children didn’t have time to turn around before a “volunteer” vulture had copied his obituary from the newspaper site into FAG–without attribution of course. Names of living relatives and their locations, included, of course. The vultures should be ashamed of themselves, and FAG should be too!
I just ran into this situation personally last week. My oldest first cousin died, and I went in to create a memorial the next morning. But someone had already created one, using the obituary that had appeared online the very day he died — the obituary that was incomplete and was corrected within a couple of hours. I contacted the person and identified myself and said I would “greatly appreciate it” if she would delete her memorial so I could create one for the family. I waited several days and never received an answer, so I created my own memorial for my cousin. Perhaps these people believe they’re doing a service, but they’re denying — dare I say ROBBING — the family of the opportunity to honor their own loved one.
Update — Yesterday I received a “no-reply” email from Find A Grave saying that they had merged the duplicate memorial into the one I manage. Yay!! I went in and deleted the incomplete obituary.
One thought is to have attendees, not just those with an industry presence, approach the FindAGrave team at conferences where they exhibit and respectfully ask the staff one on one to change their policy. Having done trade shows in my past life, I will tell you there is always a debrief at the end to discuss sales opportunities, product/offering suggestions, and other general comments.If enough people stopped by an mentioned this, it could send a message that this is a mainstream issue, not just one of a few pundits.
You’re assuming there is a separate Find A Grave presence at these conferences. In my experience, it’s an Ancestry corporate presence.
Distressing, indeed. I, too, am keeping an eye out for the obit of a family member in order to post the information correctly and so that family (not a stranger) is memorializing the person. And, also to inhibit the posting of information about living family members.
What a shame that this has to be the case. I agree, I would love to have more information from cemeteries – photos of older graves, with inscriptions. Kinda what the site was made for, right?
Hmm. We understand that “facts” cannot be copyrighted, but the text of an obituary is subject to a copyright and probably owned by the family member that wrote it. In cases where one of these squatters does a copy-and-paste of an obituary, isn’t Find A Grave obliged to honor a takedown notice?
The pirate that took over my family memorials wrote an obit that read like a computer had written it. It took months but I finally got control of the entries for my family.
Unfortunately, this is not the only problem with Find A Grave. I’ve been trying for a year to get a handful of family memorials transferred to me. The person who created them maintains over 41,000 memorials and states on her profile she is not receiving emails. Her lack of response not only prevents transfers, but also prevents any edits such as the addition of gravestone photos or linking to other memorials. I again wrote to FAG last week and asked them to intervene and transfer the memorials to me. I’m not very hopeful.
Sigh… There is simply NO excuse for allowing that.
I received a very pleasant surprise this morning: Find A Grave transferred my family member’s memorials to me for maintenance.
Diane Dotsko, it appears you’re not familiar with how Find A Grave works. Despite what her profile says, you most certainly can submit edits to link memorials, add photos, etc. For the links, if she doesn’t accept/decline them within 3 weeks, the system automatically will. Adding photos has nothing to do with someone receiving email – you do that right on the memorial just like suggesting the links.
As to the transfer requests, you should still follow the process detailed in the Help section. Don’t forget to check the box to send yourself a copy of the “Suggest Other Corrections” because that is what you will need to forward to Find A Grave staff. If your relationship is “within guidelines”, the transfer is guaranteed. If your relationships aren’t on that list, staff probably won’t transfer.
This is the problem I’ve had with the person who holds the memorial for my great grandfather. The memorial was created with his name being misspelled, the California death index info was incorrect. I requested a correction of his name and gave some additional facts. I did this to show my relation to him and requested that they transfer the memorial to me, as he is my direct ancestor. They made the name corrections and even did some additional research and pulled up the newspaper article that announced his death, he was tragically stabbed in a brawl and died 5 days later. I waited a long while without any response. So I requested again for the transfer and again never got a response. I did forward the second requested email to Find A Grave and never got a response from them. It’s been about two years now and I have kinda given up. I think it’s sad that these “memorial horders” are allowed to hold the memorials of people they have no connection to and refuse to answer the repeated requests from the family.
This happened to me recently. Within a day or so of the publication of my mother’s obituary, the Find A Grave entry was up. At least the individual was willing to transfer it to me so I could remove the names of living people.
I’m sorry you had to deal with that.
I have encountered this situation a few times. I was wondering if the funeral home had posted the info. It seemed a likely situation given the initials of the poster.
Would it be possible create a memorial before the death of a loved one. Much like placing the birth date on a stone/plaque and leaving the death date blank. It would give you control over the Find A Grave memorial.
And when should we do this? When a family member goes into the hospital? When each one hits, say, Medicare age? At birth maybe, just in case, because after all we never know…? It’s not that it isn’t a way of getting around this. I’m just expressing my utter frustration with the need to have to “get around this.” There’s an easy permanent solution that doesn’t hurt anybody and doesn’t force people to create death memorials for the living: make everyone except the family wait for a short time after a recent death.
Don’t post burial information in the obit. It will stop most contributors from creating a memorial. Unless you are family or a close family friend planning to attend, the public doesn’t need the burial information.
Mary, not posting burial info in the obit doesn’t stop many of these vultures. My dad’s obit specifically stated his cremains would be buried later, but not where. Someone created a memorial and just said the burial site was unknown! Finally, after 15 months and a couple e-mails to FindAGrave admin after the creator refused to transfer, the memorial was transferred to me. When my mother died a couple months ago (in this case, not a surprise like my dad’s death was), I’m sorry to say one of the first things I did was create her FindAGrave memorial before a vulture could swoop in.
Yeah I don’t even use Find A Grave anymore and prefer Billiongraves since no 1 person controls the profile of a memorial. Plus you have to provide an image or document to make one.
Ancestry as a whole though is fishy to me. They claim to have more records than anyone else, but fail to mention many of those records are just duplicates of the same record. Then while they proclaim to never sell your DNA data themselves in the ToS and Privacy Policy, the same can’t be said for the 3rd party company that processes the DNA for Ancestry, called Sorenson Genomics. Read their ToS and Privacy Policies sometime.
One of my latest find a grave photo request that popped into my email was for two memorials, one for ‘Mother’ Smith and the other for ‘Father’ Smith. I looked at each memorial and neither of the memorials had any other information. Those 2 memorials were entered by a serial inputter who has 35,815+ memorials. So again, I say to find a grave- stop showing the number of memorials that people enter… It is not a contest nor a race.
I have seen markers in cemeteries that only identify the deceased as “Father”, “Mother” and the surname. Rarely do those I’ve seen have birth or death dates. Whether the creator has entered 5, 500, or 50,000, those are legitimate Find A Grave memorials. Why wouldn’t they be?
I first became aware of the short comings of Find A Grave when I challenged someone for proof on a family search tree, for a connection they had made. That person then went into Find A Grave, created their so called proof and then linked it to the family search tree.
My dad passed away on January 31. I meant to check findagrave but didn’t get around to it until your post reminded me. Sure enough, he is there. It will take 4 months before his headstone is in place, so where is this information coming from?
Certainly not a visit to the cemetery. I don’t see any relationship to this person based on the other memorials he/she posted. I will make contact and see if I can figure it out. It’s really absurd.
I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with this.
When anyone dies, like when they are born or married or divorced or arrested or?????? it is PUBLIC RECORD. Also, social security, IRS and many many other sources are immediately notified of a death–they are probably notified before family members, if the truth was known. As a researcher, I have to tell you engravings on tombstones is not the only way death information is obtained.
I had a similar experience last year when my teenage daughter passed away. The Find a Grave entry was created the day after she died. In my case, the obituary had not been published as I hadn’t even written it at that point. We actually hadn’t even purchased her plot at that point.
The creator was kind enough to give me control over her listing; however, she would not answer how she was able to post when the obit was not even out.
I’m so sorry you had to deal with that.
Brittany, while I cannot speak for the person who created your daughter’s memorial, some Find A Grave members don’t respond to any type of question, not just about recent deaths, due to prior bad interactions. One person asked me why I thought I had “the right” to create memorials for anyone I’m not related to. I walked and photographed several local cemeteries and created memorials if there wasn’t one already. The person who contacted me was irate that I had created her relatives and was quite blistering in her messages. I don’t like being treated that way so I don’t usually reply to people, especially in what may be a volatile situation.
Nobody needs abuse; nobody needs to respond to abuse; but volunteers need to promptly transfer memorials to family members, whether they’ve had bad experiences with others or not.
A simple 90 day waiting period from the date of death would do the trick – and some thicker skin. Lord people do love to complain.
People should complain when things are wrong. Squeaky wheels and grease, y’know…
From Find A Grave to DNA results, Big Brother is watching us. Beware!