“a kind of Facebook profile for the afterlife”

October 24, 2024 6:56 AM

Think of it like a social media site, but for the dead. People can use it to “visit” the graves of their loved ones—in some cases, maybe even for the first time. But it’s not just for mourning or nostalgia: The revelations held in cataloged graves have proven vital for everyone ranging from historians to journalists to your aunt who is really into your extended family’s history.

–My Weekends With the Dead [archive link] by Tony Hồ Trần, a “graver” whose hobby of photographing graves for findagrave.com sprung from solving an old family mystery.
posted by Kattullus (15 comments total)

Somewhat surprised about the "controversy" aspect, but I'm coming from a genealogy background. Sometimes information, any information, is so hard to find, that some random person posting a photo of a tombstone on the internet can be a wonderful gift. I think something that I have gained in my time researching family history is the understanding that the departed don't belong to you, no more than a living person belongs to you. They belong to others who knew them, they belong to coworkers, or strangers they see from time to time, and at the same time, they belong to no one. It's only through taking all the pieces from everyone that we can start to understand who someone is, especially someone whom we never had the chance to meet.

I have some ancestors, who given their background, should have a burial spot somewhere in a specific geographic area. Two died in the 1880s or 1890s. Another just after 1900. So far as I have been able to tell, two of them, a married couple (husband died sometime in the 1890s, his wife after 1900), but I don't know where they are buried. I have never found a marker, and it would bring me immense joy if someone did and shared it on FindAGrave.com. The third individual is memorialized in memory, as my great-uncle before he passed away, shared his memory of his father, my great-grandfather, taking him to a cemetery, quite literally, high on a windy hill, in the middle of a valley in Appalachia, and saying, "This is where my mom is buried." She has no stone or marker to remind us which specific plot of earth is hers. It's not even easy to get to this cemetery because it's in the middle of a pasture on someone else's farm. I realized now, I need to put this information into FindAGrave because it's possible that if I don't, it will end with me.

And to balance this out a smidge, there is an irritating quirk to the FindAGrave website. People can control the memorial pages they create. So when I went to update an entry for another great-grandfather, it had to be "approved" by the person who had created the original. I assume this is kind of like posting an image on Wikipedia, you can set the level of rights to an image. That was kind of weird, especially since the person who had created it wasn't a direct descendant.
posted by Atreides at 7:20 AM on October 24, 2024 [6 favorites]

So when I went to update an entry for another great-grandfather, it had to be "approved" by the person who had created the original. I assume this is kind of like posting an image on Wikipedia, you can set the level of rights to an image. That was kind of weird, especially since the person who had created it wasn't a direct descendant.

It's not well-situated in the interface, but you can request that a memorial page be transferred to your management. I've done this a few times for graves in neglected cemeteries in DC that I have been been trying to document over the years.
posted by reedbird_hill at 7:35 AM on October 24, 2024 [4 favorites]

In a site of related interest, the (mostly) political blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money’s Erik Loomis has a 1700+ entry “Erik Visits an American Grave” series that explores US history one grave at a time. First list Second list
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:53 AM on October 24, 2024 [2 favorites]

That Loomis series is particularly fun in my opinion because he tends to switch between, like, a baseball player he likes or someone who was pretty great to like "here was a horrible racist who did these eleventyseven terrible things, ohh how I hate them." I enjoy the contrast.
posted by Wretch729 at 8:58 AM on October 24, 2024 [3 favorites]

I think the article underplays how weird some of the hard core "gravers" are: the r/Genealogy subreddit has plenty of stories of people fighting to get control of a relative's grave record on findagrave so that they can correct it, or just not have a stranger managing it.

I read one last week where someone found a record for a person who was still alive, and the Ancestry people wouldn't intervene. A few commenters suggested making findagrave entries for the executive staff at Ancestry to see if maybe then they would be interested in correcting the data and better-managing ownership.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:16 AM on October 24, 2024 [4 favorites]

r/Genealogy subreddit has plenty of stories of people fighting to get control of a relative's grave record on findagrave so that they can correct it, or just not have a stranger managing it.

Findagrave has also been active since '95, so there are a lot of users that have just checked out - or, you know, checked out.

It's the only still-active site I've been a user of longer than MeFi.
posted by reedbird_hill at 9:59 AM on October 24, 2024 [3 favorites]

So findagrave.com is a place where you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave?
posted by Kattullus at 10:08 AM on October 24, 2024 [4 favorites]

A few years ago I googled my great-grandfather - can't remember why now - and this site came up. I thought it was rather nice. He now has links to both his parents and children, and his newspaper obituary that I'd never seen.

Also interesting to be able to read about the people who made the entries - one catalogued the cemetery while doing genealogy around the area. A second contributor had family in the cemetery and added more recent burials, including my grandfather - and has since passed and is also buried there.

My grandmother's obit isn't posted, and I have a copy of that somewhere... I suppose this is how they suck you in. It's going to have a rough time with the next couple generations, though - we're all leaning burn-and-scatter.
posted by mersen at 10:54 AM on October 24, 2024 [3 favorites]

My mother, who became serious about genealogy after she retired, had an experience directly opposed to the author's: she accidentally came across my great-grandfather's grave in a now-disused Jewish cemetery in NYC, and it was more of a jumpscare than anything else. Nobody knew where he was--or wanted to know. (Since the 1930s, when he died unexpectedly, the instructions in our family have been that no child should be named after him, which if you know anything about Ashkenazi naming traditions is...a statement.) She cleaned up the grave, but compromised by yelling at him the entire time.
posted by thomas j wise at 1:10 PM on October 24, 2024 [4 favorites]

FindAGrave has various problems, but for me it has been a great resource - the "volunteers all over the place pitch in" old-internet method really doing its thing. I've found a bunch of ancestors (for my own genealogy and for other people) that I would never have been able to find otherwise. And finding the info often leads to new clues, new connections, etc that you couldn't predict. It's really great that it's a free resource.
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:23 PM on October 24, 2024 [2 favorites]

Findagrave has been super helpful in weeding through the mystery of my paternal grandmother's birth family - when you have little to go on and conflicting information (There's at least 3 people with very similar birth years and names that my "brick wall" target could be, and folks on Ancestry and such tend to smash them all together), sometimes "walking the rows" of the cemetery and making a pins-and-string board of surnames and siblings really helps.

Considering I'm literally on the other side of the continent from the small towns in Michigan and Quebec that I'm examining, it's been enormously helpful. It's the sort of small, thankless data input by passionate people that the Old Internet was made of.
posted by The demon that lives in the air at 1:58 PM on October 24, 2024 [2 favorites]

seems Matt made the first find a grave Post in the year 2000 followed kliuless in 2001.

my grandmother hadn't passed yet, not for another 7 years and she was 95 in 2000.

interesting story. What's freaking me out is my grandfathers, here he is, yes, parents dressed boys in dresses or smocks then.
now, that picture was added by someone I have no idea how they got that picture as I remember that picture, I have a copy. Perhaps my cousins did, sending the picture to the graver. But my uncles grave, my cousins father, has no pictures. The family archive passed to me but my uncle did get some photos. what's really odd is of all the pictures of my grandfather, this is the one I would have added.
posted by clavdivs at 2:30 PM on October 24, 2024 [2 favorites]

I was listed at Find a Grave for a while because my name is on my late husband's tombstone. I managed to get that corrected. The new-ish listing for my mother's grave has her newspaper obituary. It occurs to me that it is probably the one thing I've written that will last the longest.
posted by Miss Cellania at 4:24 AM on October 25, 2024 [2 favorites]

I've been taking photos for Find a Grave for almost 4 years. I started wandering in a small rural cemetery every Friday afternoon while waiting for my kid to finish her horseback riding lessons. Usually I just walk each row & take photos of any stones that have memorials without pictures. (I do not create memorials.)

I like fulfilling photo requests; I always describe it as "geocaching for dead people." There's something very satisfying about being able to provide someone with a picture of their relative's headstone. My parents (and their parents) were very into genealogy, so I know how important this can be.

I've seen a memorial in a local cemetery for someone I know is still alive; I assume that someone added her to the site because she has a shared headstone with her deceased husband. Her side just lacks the death date. I imagine it would be quite strange to find yourself listed prematurely.
posted by belladonna at 6:11 PM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

I'm particularly grateful to the people who photograph and transcribe institutional cemeteries. I was researching a collateral line, and had one family that just sort of petered out, and it was only due to people recording poorhouse records and state hospital cemeteries that I knew the end of their story.
posted by tavella at 10:19 AM on October 29, 2024 [2 favorites]