I was reminded this week by one of my Guest Writers’ articles about FindAGrave.com and using it to not only research your ancestors but also as way to memorialize them. So I puttered on over to the site, since I had not been there for a while. WOW.. while the site doesnt look very fancy, the Ancestry information that they have has really grown.
This is and entirely VOLUNTEER effort and always has been, which is rare in this day and age when everyone seems to be trying to turn their websites into money making endeavors and I was extremely impressed with some of the features they have. (Free request a photo of a Gravestone is my favorite). According to their site they have listings for over 56,000 graves!
I decided to poke around a bit since I had recently lost an Aunt to see what information might be there.. I have to say what I found brought tears to my eyes.. literally. I found my Aunt’s grave listing and the volunteer had also posted the Obituary but I also found my Uncle – her husband who I did not even know had passed and his obituary as well.
I was so sad, but grateful, not only to know he had passed but that some kind person had posted the obituary.
I did a little more digging and since a good portion of my tree resided fairly close by I refined my search to show everyone in that particular cemetery and found the memorials for 5 more ancestors.
If you would like to “dig” around at FindAGrave.com, subscription is free, you can upload and add to their database, or put flowers or notes on a family grave. Just one thing to mention, the first time I logged back in from the login page it kicked me back to the login, after looking around a bit, I noticed that I was indeed logged in and it showed in my status bar on the left hand side of the page. 
I really recommend this website.. One word of caution, addiction is possible… 5 hours and 2am came and went quickly a few nights ago and Im still recovering from the sleep deprivation.
Happy Trails…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by C. Greer.
Find-a-Grave is a valuable service; however, I would apply some caution with this site. There are a few pitfalls–namely, the confusion on its purpose. The site states it is primarily a “memorial” site, secondly a “grave registration site,” and thirdly a “genealogy” site. (I’m paraphrasing, and I may not have the first two purposes in order.)
That said, buyer beware. I’d been caught off guard with Find-a-Grave (and yes, I have posted some gravestones there) in two situations. First, my mom had died late last year. Within 48 hours of her death, the MORNING her obit had been published, someone had lifted her obit and posted it on Find-a-Grave (word for word, and listing survivor names, clearly against the terms of service). While I was not upset someone totally unrelated to us did this, I was upset that this happened so quickly (I have Google alerts for specific names setup) AND the fact that survivor names were left in (no permission given for publication other than the actual obit).
Secondly, I had posted some Polish graves using the male derivative of names (-SKI rather than -SKA) for a few of my female ancestors, knowing full well that is how my family and fellow modern Polish researchers would immediately seek these members. I’d gone through a bit of grief over that for NOT following the terms of service (“transcribe EXACTLY as the stone is”). Also–a few of my ancestors’ gravestones actually have the WRONG dates on them. So I used the correct dates of birth or death and that seemed to cause some dissention.
The support for Find-a-Grave is not immediate. It took me a few weeks to resolve my mom’s memorial situation (I had wanted it turned over to me OR have it corrected so no survivor names were there) and to deal with the fact I did NOT want my ancestor’s graves changed due to the name/date issue. Aye yi yi.
I won’t detail the administrative problems I had–but I would not jump into it head first. Read the discussion board, learn it for a few days before joining to see if this suits you. Indeed, Find-a-Grave CAN provide and share valuable data, but only if you are willing to put up with some of the administrative problems–and, if you do submit photos–risk that your photos likely will end up on someone’s tree or even website–without attribution to you as the creator. I’ve taken to putting a watermark and a very small piece of text on the photos now to indicate that I do indeed own the copyright.