Find A Grave - the Good and the Bad

Find-A-Grave has been active for more than 20 years, first appearing online way back in 1995. Originally it consisted of records of celebrities and their burial sites and was created by Jim Tipton, an American with a passion for visiting the graves of the rich and famous.

As the site grew it expanded to include the graves of non-celebrities and moved from the United States to the rest of the world.

As the popularity of the site took off Tipton sold the Find A Grave to Ancestry. The site now contains more than 75 million photos and over 170 million burial records.

The vast majority of contributors on Find A Grave have the best of intentions — to help others. At its best, the site can be a boon for Family History researchers.  Being able to view the grave/headstone of a relative buried overseas or in a place we cannot easily access ourselves is a huge treat.  That this website is completely free makes it even better.  Several times I have been delighted to find a relative has a memorial on Find-A-Grave, complete with dates and details.  Always I am amazed at the generosity of people out there, giving their time to help make researching easier for others.

Within the Find-A-Grave community, however, there has emerged a small group of users who seem more motivated by competition. The top contributors have added over 200,000 memorials each, and there are some who have over a million each.

Issues have arisen with the webpage of users - all volunteers - who in their haste to add to their count of memorials, have forgotten that not everyone wants their recently deceased loved ones to have an online memorial, especially one added and controlled by a complete stranger.  In the worst cases, a Find-A-Grave obituary has been posted online before all the individual's family members have even been notified.  Then there are issues of accuracy - and how to get inaccurate information corrected of removed.

Several suggestions have been made to create a moratorium on non-family-members posting memorials for the recently-deceased on Find A Grave for at least some time to give the families of those involved a chance to deal with a loved one’s death.  To date no steps seem to have been made in this direction.