Have you spent some time with the fantastic FREE website, www.findagrave.com? Over the recent holidays, I spent some happy time looking up my ancestors to look for photos of their tombstones. Oh, the things I learned……… I knew Grandfather Mel died long before Hope but 28 years she was a widow? That’s a long time.
Ron Marvin. EWGS member, gave a great workshop last November on this website. He offered several excellent tips:
* Understand that the photos have been added to FindAGrave by volunteers who live near that cemetery and have tromped around, photographed and uploaded the images.
* Confirm that you do have the correct person.
* Review the listed links (if present) to parents, spouses, children and siblings……… often you can reconstruct an entire family here!
* Check to see who added flowers……. an unknown cousin? Consider adding flowers yourself so that cousin can contact you.
* Once confirmed, you can snip-and-save the image to your computer clipboard and then upload it to Ancestry or FamilySearch.
* If you wish to upload additional information for this ancestor, or suggest corrected information, click on Suggested Edits.
* If the FindAGrave entry for your ancestor does not have a biography page, do consider compiling and uploading one. Ditto for an obituary or a photograph.
Go spent some happy time with your ancestors and Find-A-Grave. You’ll enjoy it, I guarantee.
It’s important to verify the information one finds on Find a Grave, just like it is everywhere else. There are mistakes on Find a Grave and since Ancestry bought it, it is difficult to impossible to get memorials corrected. Even with substantive evidence provided, Ancestry refuses to make corrections if the memorial manager refuses to.
The original Find a Grave made it clear that it is a memorial site, not a genealogy site, thus family trees were not to be used as verifications, and if one provided them verifications of mistakes, they corrected them if memorial managers refused. Ancestry has abdicated that responsibility so, again, be sure to verify elsewhere (but not with family trees!) anything you find on Find a Grave.
I have found it highly useful. I have also found it wrong. My great, great uncle is listed in two cemeteries in California. Having his death certificate indicate his burial place, having visited that site, and having descendants comment on that site, I wrote the sponsor, and things have changed. He is still listed twice, but in the same cemetery under two different cemetery names with the same headstone and having two different middle names (the latter long a source of disagreement by his descendants).
I still recommend it.