Some further observations about current policies at Find A Grave


By Chris Mills

I'm not planning on making a habit out of this (this topic will soon turn into the proverbial beating of the dead horse, if you'll pardon the expression) but I did get some feedback on the article I wrote last month and also had some more thoughts on what has happened to Find A Grave, so it is once more into the breach.

First, the level of mistrust and anger at the Find A Grave site administration has ratcheted up quite a bit since Ancestry bought them out two years ago, from what I can see to the responses to the article. Given Ancestry's habit of buying up free websites and either shutting them down or incorporating them directly into Ancestry, this is not too surprising.

Second, other people have had their group accounts suspended or seized, this was not an isolated incident involving group accounts that I created, this is now going on all over the site. As I said before, if they want to drive away some of the most productive members of the site, this is a good way to do it.

I also found out after I wrote the first article that anything that goes through the edit system on memorials that are controlled by a suspended account can go through, but when you click on the option to "Suggest any other correction or addition" option on the edit page, you receive the following message:

"We can not proceed because of the reason(s) listed below. Please press the back button in your browser, correct the problem(s) and try again."

"That contributor's account is disabled so they can not receive suggestions."

As long as these memorials exist in this state of "limbo" there is now no direct way to add or change anything in the bio section or even ask for a memorial transfer.

Once I discovered that was going on I looked at memorials that were created or maintained by other contributors whose accounts had been suspended and found the same thing was happening with their memorials. Unless the memorial says at the bottom that it is maintained by "Find A Grave" you cannot get the bio section changed or ask for a transfer.

I did put a note on my conbributor page that the Tropico Gravers account was suspended and if you wanted a memorial transfer or changes made to the bio section of one of those memorials all I could think of was to email edit@findagrave.com, put the memorial number in the subject line, and put in the message body if you wanted a memorial transfer or if you wanted changes made to the bio section. I have a feeling these emails are going to be taken care of at a very low priority level.

Another sad thing I noticed was emails from contributors who have been so beaten down by the actions of the administrators that they have given up, they apparently now no longer do anything on the site and they don't even want to know what is going on anymore. I found this perhaps the saddest thing I had seen all along.

I also got a few responses from people who just maintain a few memorials (relatively -- at this point I consider anyone who controls less than 10,000 memorials to only be maintaining a "few" memorials). Some of these people think that what happened to me and my group accounts is something that has no bearing whatsoever on what they are doing and it might as well be in another galaxy.

They may be right. I hope for their sakes that they are. But at times like this I think of a quote from Martin Neimoller, who was a priest in Nazi Germany who opposed the Nazis and ended up in a concentration camp, although, luckily for him, he survived the war, although he had associates who were murdered by the Nazis.

"When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out."

Some of you at this point are going to be outraged that I am comparing Find A Grave and Ancestry.com to Nazis. I am not comparing them to Nazis, but I am saying that if you allow people to be oppressed (and I do feel that what Find A Grave has done is oppressive, or at the very least fraud or theft, which can also be considered forms of opression) without feeling some sense of outrage or fear that you could be next on the list, you are either immoral or naive.

I am going to make a few more observation before I get into the gist of what I am going to say. Contributors are now transferring memorials to accounts of relatives because they are afraid their own accounts are going to be suspended for some real or imagined infraction of the rules. These are not signs of a healthy website. The next item is not too surprising, but it does tie in with what I said in the previous article that Find A Grave is going out of their way to directly control as many memorials as they can. When the site administration is being asked to transfer memorials owned by a deceased contributor to one of their relatives who is active on the site (typically this is a cousin) the answers they are getting back are that there will be no blanket transfers but any individual transfers within the Find A Grave transfer guidelines (up to four generations direct descent) will be granted. In other words, if you do not designate another account as your successor account, those people, no matter what their relationship to you, will not be given your memorials.

The Find A Grave transfer rules are set up in such a way to encourage memorial hoarding by contributors, but they also make it easier for Find A Grave to take over those memorials when the contributor who controls them either dies, gets booted off the site for some bizarre "infraction", or burns out and stops dealing with the site entirely, for whatever reason.

This is one of the reasons why I never followed the transfer guidelines, I was always willing to transfer a memorial to another contributor, no matter what their relationship with the deceased was, or even if they had no relationship with the subject of the memorial.

In any event ...

I have spent a lot of time (rather too much in fact) trying to understand what is going on with Ancestry and with Find A Grave. This task has been rendered a bit more difficult because of a number of contradictions that seem to be built into Find A Grave.

For one thing, the Find A Grave FAQs and site representatives will say over and over that it is "only" a graves registration site and it should be used for that purpose. However, if it is only a graves registration site, why are the links there to add people to parents and spouses? What does that have to do with a graves registration site? That's a genealogy function, and adding that functionality to the site made it much more akin to Ancestry.com. In addition, why were "burial unknown" memorials ever allowed, when the site is called "Find A Grave". Again, this is clearly for genealogical purposes.


Page created 13 September 2015

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