I’ve been researching my family history. Find A Grave has been so helpful. Found nearly all my grandfather’s brothers scattered around in different cemeteries. My aunt researched my dad’s side of the family and used vacations to drive to cemeteries for her research in the 1970’s. She logged thousands of miles looking up death records and searching cemeteries. Now its all a click away and there’s usually photos of the headstones.
just wanted to pass this along. It’s a free research tool. Gotta love modern technology.
Very cool indeed. Perhaps it will help with my research on my paternal grandmother’s family, whose last name is “Graves,” and was always too much of a PITA to research cemetery records for!
I LOVE the Find A Grave site. I’ve used it to find out more about some of my ancestors, and created memorial pages for both family members and for some of the slaves interviewed for the Slave Narrative Project that I’ve researched. I’ve met several very distantly related cousins through the site and just recently the daughter of my mom’s best friend who I hadn’t seen in at least 20 years found me there through finding my mom’s memorial page. I can’t tell you how nice it was to hear from her, and we never would have found each other again without this site. We’ve both married, undergone name-changes, and moved to different states since we saw each other last.
I was also recently contacted by the great-great-great-granddaughter of one of the former slaves I created a memorial page for. She wanted to know if I had any more information than what was on the page and I sent her a copy of his interview along with a newspaper article that I’d found written about him in 1936, his census data, and some information about other family members. I thought it was really awesome, because, of all the strangers I’ve done genealogical research on this particular family has had me particularly intrigued. This man, Augustus, and his wife, Irene, named one son Ira, after Irene, and a daughter Gussie, after Augustus. All of their children, including the ones besides Gussie and Ira, named their children variations of Irene and Augustus, also, and this tradition has followed generation after generation in every branch of the family, so that even today there is a descendant named Ira with a daughter named Augusta.
Find A Grave was recently purchased by Ancestry.com, so I expect they will try to monetize it in the near future. Another great free resource is FamilySearch.com, which has almost everything Ancestry has, except it us free. And since it is owned by the Mormon church, it will remain so.
Oh darn it all to heck! Why does ancestry.com have to have their finger in every little genealogical pie? One of the things I loved about Find A Grave was that they claimed they’d always be free. I have institutional access to Ancestry.com but I refuse to buy a personal membership.
I’ve put a lot of family members on there and also searched for grave sites here locally for other people. I hope they don’t start charging for it, as many people would likely stop contributing.
Like the SSN death index. A few years ago I found people on a free search. I tried again a couple weeks ago and the free one I found didn’t return any result. Even people I found a couple years ago weren’t coming up. Has to be that darn ancestry.com They have the search that works.
If anyone knows a free search that still works please post.
I’ve got a picture of a headstone with my real name. Might be an uncle/cousin (?) or something waaaay upstream. Only lived a year and a day. Dead over a hundred years now. I’ll bet I’m the only person who has thought of him in a long time.
My grandparents are buried in a tiny Jewish cemetery in rural Quebec. Their gravestones are entirely in Hebrew, no English (or French). The graves don’t seem to be findable on Find A Grave.
Actually I’ve only been to this cemetery a couple of times in my life. It’s very hard to find, out in farmland in the vicinity of Mirabel Airport.
All of the memorials on Find a Grave are put up by volunteers, which means that there are a lot of cemeteries that aren’t listed, and many cemeteries that only have partial records. It’s very possible that a remote, hard to find cemetery such as the one your grandparents were buried in may not be listed.
The SSN death index is not an official record and is incomplete. I found this out when I contacted the federal agency to find out why my father isn’t listed.
Amberlei: Spot on. Anybody can post an entry to the website, and requests can be made through the site for volunteers to look for a headstone in cemeteries near them.
Rootsweb used to be good, but Ancestry.com took that one over too Hopefully Find A Grave will remain free, I’ve put several graves out there - but damned if I’ll put more out there if Ancestry starts charging for footwork others have done.
My father-in-law spends his free time cataloguing graves in his home county. It’s a giant amount of work. Darn interesting, too. There are 18th century burials just down the street from his house. The tombstones are pretty crazy–if you can read them at all.
It would be a smart move to keep find a grave free. People can only look up family member names that they know. That can get them interested in Genealogy research and they’ll need to sign up to ancestry.com to dig deeper into their family history. Or they can go to FamilySearch.com but ancestry is hoping people won’t know about that site.
Rootsweb is still free. When you go to the page, it gives you both search engines. Ancestry knows that it has a more comprehensive database and relies on people to pony up for the info.
I also recommend USGenweb.org (I think it’s ‘org’), which is a state-by-state and county database. Volunteers maintain the sites and some are better than others. Some states, like NY, don’t play well with others as far as sharing historical data, but there are volunteers on most of the sites who will do lookups for you, and there are query boards on most all of them.
Keep in mind that data on headstones are not reliable. Birth dates in particular are iffy. But middle initials, spellings, etc. are a problem. Especially the farther back you go.
They are a secondary source of actual data. More standardized sources like birth/death certificates, etc. should be trusted more. (OTOH, Mrs. FtG’s mom’s birth certificate has the wrong birthday.)
I’ll have to share this with my youngest sister. She researched our mother’s side of the family all the way back to Burlington, Vermont during the Revolutionary War. Through the internet, she found someone there who helped her out by digging up records at various official places in the area, just out of the goodness of his heart. He even found the cemetery our earliest known ancestor in the U.S. was buried. Several years ago, my sister and her family went to see it themselves and to thank the fellow for his help.
If there’s ever a +1 this would be it. I’ve even found stones with bad dates of death, off by years. Tombstones are nice for finding some information, but it’s just a start.
I’ve also found that a lot of people will put stuff up that isn’t the truth because they have heard it is. I do a lot of photos and correcting information, but it can be a pain when people just put what they think up. It’s still a good resource, but I look at other places first a lot of times.
I have one memorial page I put up for someone using the date on the death certificate. Someone added a photo showing a headstone with the same name, from the same cemetery, but with a death date 23 years earlier than that given on the death certificate. Given that census records have him alive during this time, I’m convinced the stone either isn’t his or (No DOB given on the stone) or just flat out has the date wrong.
This is also true of probably the majority of family trees that are available on Ancestry. It’s human nature to accept information without having a citation for it, but for a genealogist, it’s anathema. People cut and paste and merge information, then it gets copied by someone else, and on and on, and eventually it’s impossible to tell what is real and what isn’t.
Hopefully Find A Grave will remain free, I’ve put several graves out there - but damned if I’ll put more out there if Ancestry starts charging for footwork others have done.