Tropico Gravers Edit Policies


We maintain over 200,000 memorials on the Find A Grave website, so we get a fair number of edits and emails with changes to memorials, sometimes averaging 50 or more a day. To cope with this volume of changes, we have created some guidelines which may be helpful when processing edits and/or emails.

As a general rule we set most edits from Accept to Ignore until we determine if they make sense or not. The only exception is the birth and death place edits, which I will go over below.

By the way, if you are not terribly familiar with the Find A Grave edit system, anytime you change anything on an edit page, you have to hit the Process selected edits button at the bottom of the page for your changes to be recorded. If you do anything else, such as navigate away from that page without hitting that button, your changes will be lost.

Markers as reference sources

We fall back on markers because they are more right than wrong, but they are not necessarily accurate either. As discussed below, names on markers are sometimes nicknames, and I have seen surnames misspelled on markers on a number of occasions. As far as dates go, if there is nothing contradicting a year on a marker I would go with it, but if I see one birth date in the social security death index and another on the marker, if I know it is the same person I will always go with the social security death index date rather than the date on the marker. In many cases birth and death years are rounded up or down so that a person who was born in December will have a birth year showing the following year, and even death dates are sometimes wrong on the markers. Whenever possible, don't view the dates on a marker as a primary source.

Dates

If an edit changes a year only date to a specific date, and the date is the same year or only a year or two different, accept the edit.

Any date changing a birth year from 1901 to 1900 should be accepted. This is because many of our records were created with a wrong birth date because of a bug in the California Death Index. Don't even worry about researching these, if you see a change like that just go ahead and put it through unless you see some evidence that the 1900 birth year is incorrect, which you will not see most of the time.

If someone is trying to add dates to a memorial that doesn`t have a birth or death date, use the following logic:

If the memorial has a death date but no birth date, try and find the person in the Social Security Death Index, the California Death Index, or the Forest Lawn Grave Locator. If you can`t find in any of those resources, put out a photo request so we can look at the marker before accepting the edit.

If the memorial has no dates, put out a photo request so we can look at a marker photo before accepting or declining the edit.

Place edits

These can come in on the same edits as date edits but they can also come in as just place edits with no changes to the dates.

If they are adding birth and death places and there are none on the memorial, let them go through (with one exception that I will note below). If they are adding additional detail, they can also go through (adding counties or counties and cities under a state for a birth or death place).

If they are trying to change a birth or death place entirely (from one state to a different state or from a place in one country to a different country) do not process it, that change needs to be researched. Sometimes these are legitimate changes but in other cases Find A Grave contributors have mixed a person up with a completely different person and are trying to change the memorial to a different person, which we do not want to allow them to do.

If a memorial has a death date between 1940 and 1997 and was created on 22 February 2012 (the first big upload Chris created for Forest Lawn), any death place change adding a death place outside of California is suspect, you can research these yourself if you want to, but in most cases a change to a death place that is a state outside California or a country outside the U.S. is going to be wrong. Again, you can research these or ask Chris or Kathy Salazar about them. You won't see many edits like this because they are usually wrong and most contributors know what they are doing and won't mix up people in this fashion.

This is only for the memorials created on 22 February 2012, any other memorials could have a death place outside of California or the U.S. and this could be completely legitimate. There are people buried in the cemetery who died in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts, and these people could have died anywhere in the world.

Relationship Links

For parent links, surnames or maiden names should match the surname of the father (if it`s a woman and no maiden name was already on the memorial, set these to ignore until someone can research to see if there is a match). The surnames of mothers may not match as a woman may have remarried after a divorce or the death of a prior spouse. The California Death Index frequently lists the maiden name of a mother so use this information if it is available.

Also check dates, parents should be at least 17 or 18 years older than their children in most cases, but someone trying to link to a parent who is less than 10 years older than their "child", or is younger than their "child", is almost always making a mistake.

If someone is trying to link two people together as spouses and the ages seem reasonable (typically not more than a 20 year age difference, and hopefully less than that) look at the plot locations, if they are buried next to each other (spaces are only different by one or two spaces) or if they are in the same lawn crypt (same lot and space number) it is a safe bet to assume they actually were married, although I have also seen parents and a child buried together in a lawn crypt (that`s why the ages also have to make sense for a spouse relationship).

The section listings can be very helpful in figuring out people who are buried near each other, so learn to navigate around them so you can find the different sections of the cemetery and find names and memorial numbers within the pages.

This one is a no brainer, but I`m amazed by how many people attempt it - do not allow a link to go through that links someone as their own spouse or their own parent. Duh!

If someone is sending a link to relatives who are buried next to each other or interred in the same niche, I would give these edits the benefit of the doubt, even if the person they are trying to link as a daughter doesn`t have a maiden name recorded.

If a link is being sent to a parent that is not obviously the correct person, but the parent has an obituary listing or other information in the bio section which tends to confirm the match, go ahead and put it through. The only exception to this I would think about would be if the child`s name was such a common one (for example a surname such as Smith) that it was difficult to tell if it was the correct person. But in general I would go with information in the bio section as a source if it makes sense.

By the way, occasionally we get edits where a person is trying to link someone's daughter-in-law as a daughter. If the maiden name doesn't match the "parent" surname and she is not a wife, she is usually a daughter-in-law and should be linked to the couple's son as a spouse, not to them as parents.

Names

This is tied in with the parent links if one or more parents are linked. It can be tied in with spouse links also, especially when you are dealing with a woman who had more than one husband after a divorce or the death of the first husband.

Firstly, do not allow multiple surnames to be placed in the surname field, even if a woman has been married multiple times. This is expressly forbidden by the Find A Grave naming conventions and also makes it impossible to search correctly for a person whose name has been mangled this way. Additionally, multiple surnames are not allowed in the maiden name field, this follows the same logic as the surname fields. Multiple married names should be documented in the bio section of the memorial and through links to the different spouses when memorials have been identified for the different husbands.

In very rare instances a woman's surname will be hyphenated, if it appears that way on her marker or in one of the death indexes it is allowed to be so on the memorial, but is is generally unusual to see it this way.

As we see more recent burials we are finding cases where Hispanic couples show both the husband and wife's surnames concatenated on their markers. I have not come up with a policy to deal with this yet but as far as I can tell the Find A Grave naming conventions still apply, you should not concatenate multiple surnames in the surname fields on a memorial.

We get edits all the time adding maiden names for women when no maiden name was present in their death index entry. I try and research as many of these as I can find but sometimes it is very difficult finding a source for these name changes. Anytime I spend too much time researching one of these edits I usually contact the contributor submitting the edit through their contributor page or via email and ask them what their source is for adding the maiden name.

Quick note here about contacting other contributors: You can email them if they have an email address, although your email is not going to come from the Tropico email address since those emails are forwarded to your particular email address. Usually I leave a message for a contributor by clicking on their name from the edit window and leaving them a message on their contributor page. However, some contributors have disabled messages on their contributor page and ALSO suppressed their email address. These people are also more than likely to send you an email SAC (Suggest a Correction) and neglect to enter their email address in the edit they have sent. This is really lame on their part, they are sending stuff to other people on the site, sometimes asking questions in their edits, and then neglecting to give you any way of getting in contact with them.

There is a way to get hold of these people, as long as they manage any memorials. Go to their list of managed memorials, any memorial, it doesn't matter, and send them an edit on one of their memorials, under the category, "Suggest any other correction or addition". This will send them an email from Find A Grave although it still won't display their email address to you. Whenever I attempt to contact someone via this method I always point out to them that they left me no other way to contact them, I would apologize for doing it this way except that they did not send me their email address and they had messages disabled on their contributor page.

If someone has messages disabled, no email address, and no memorials maintained and they have left you no way to get hold of them, if there is any problem with their edit just decline the edit and leave them as much detail as you can in the decline note. It's bad enough to be a private detective for the dead, we certainly don't need to be sleuths to try and track down the living who don't have enough common sense to leave a way for people to get in touch with them on the site.

Anyway (to get back to what we were mainly talking about here) ... The next most common types of name edits are switching first and middle names around, changing first names to nicknames and adding other first names, or adding alternate first names and moving a first name to a middle or nickname field. There is no hard and fast rule on what is right and wrong in these cases. Many times the name that is on someone's marker is not the name they were born with, but birth records and census records exist which show the alternate name a person was born or christened with. Find A Grave policies seem to be that the name on the marker, no matter what it is derived from, can be considered the first name even if was originally a nickname or a middle name.

That being said, if I see evidence that a birth name was used up until someone's twenties and they later changed their first name to a different name, I am usually willing to accept an edit changing the name on the marker to a nickname or middle name and switching the first name to the person's original first name. In some cases I have not done this because a person's parents saddled them with a ridiculous first name (some kind of family name, apparently) that they must have hated, in those cases I have documented the name change in the bio section and left the person's first name as the name on the marker.

If I switch the first and middle name around and what appears to be the middle name is in the death indexes or on the marker as a first name, I always put that name in the nickname field. Some people get confused when they see the first name followed by a middle name followed by the middle name again in quotation marks as a nickname, but that is the way the names are supposed to display on the memorials, that is how the site is set up (just as maiden name are italicized, that is by design as well).

Other Edits

In addition to name, place and date edits, we also get edits adding marker transcriptions, GPS coordinates, etc. If you notice a misspelling on a marker transcription go ahead and put the edit through and then fix it on the memorial. The GPS coordinate add edits we go ahead and accept, the presumption is that the person sending the edit has recorded the correct coordinates.

If someone suggests a plot location change please forward that edit to Chris. If it's correct not only does it need to be updated on the memorial but also in the database of Forest Lawn burials that he is maintaining.

The Bio Section of the memorials

This area is the space underneath the person's name and dates but above the cemetery and plot information fields. You can add absolutely anything in here with no restrictions other than (hopefully) good taste and accuracy.

We use this field to note a number of things. If there are name and date discrepancies that cannot be reconciled, we document them here (for example, there are three potential birth years for a person and the sources all disagree). If a contributor has sent in names for parents but no memorial links, add those here. If a mother's maiden name is recorded in the death indexes but there is no link to a memorial it's also a good idea to add that information to the bio section.

As far as adding obituaries, officially Find A Grave has put restrictions on what should and should not be added to the memorials. I believe these "restrictions" are just to keep the legal department happy as I have never seen an obituary removed from a memorial. That being said, if someone requests that the names of any possible living relatives be redacted from an obituary posted on one of our memorials, we would comply with that request. I have never received such a request and I have been on the site for over eight years.

I have, however, on a few occasions received requests to delete a memorial completely. If you see such a request forward it to Chris and he will determine if it is legitimate, to the best of his knowledge. It is OK for family to ask that a memorial be removed, but if they then add a memorial for the same person themselves this is against the site rules and can get them banned.

As far as what is appropriate for a bio section, you just can't always make everyone happy. I would not normally say in a bio section that someone committed suicide, I feel that is outside the bounds of good taste. Saying that they died in a car crash, an airplane crash, or were a murder victim is allowed, although I would hesitate to incorporate too much detail (unless it's a plane crash, I'm sorry, I am fascinated by those and sometimes add links to Wikipedia articles on those). We are talking about memorials here, not police reports. Again, use your own best judgment and if you are unsure about how much to add to a bio section just ask Chris or Kathy.

Alleged Duplicate Memorials

Forward any emails alleging that a memorial was duplicated to Chris. This is because there are many "burial unknown" memorials floating around Find A Grave and over time contributors have moved these into the correct cemetery after someone else has created a memorial for that person in the correct cemetery. Many of these contributors are unaware that if they have not placed a burial unknown memorial in a cemetery within 30 days of creating the memorial, these memorials lose any "seniority" they have on the site. Chris has archives in his Forest Lawn database that show which memorials were there before he created his memorials so he can determine whether or not a memorial is a "duplicate" or not.

Transfer requests

We transfer to anyone, we don't care if they are related or not. Our only wish is that when someone maintains a memorial that they "add value" to the memorial by adding more information about the person.

If someone sponsors a memorial we also typically transfer to them if we notice the memorial has been sponsored. The only case in which I have not done this was recently when I realized a contributor had apparently mixed up a person with someone else and probably had sponsored a memorial for someone she was not related to. I told her she had made a mistake and let her know she might want to try and get her $5 back from Find A Grave, although I don't know if that's possible or not.

Summary

This may all seem bewildering. Over time you will get more of a feel for what makes sense and what doesn't. If you get stuck on something, just leave it on "Ignore" and kick it over to Chris or Kathy. The burden of proof is not on us, if there are doubts or discrepancies, the burden of proof is on the person who is requesting a change, not on the person who maintains the memorial.

The Untimely Demise of Tropico Gravers

Note: On 17 August 2015 the Tropico Gravers account on Find A Grave was suspended with no notice. When AJ Marik could finally be bothered to respond to our emails, he said that Find A Grave no longer allowed group accounts to operate, per instructions from management at Ancestry.com (but he would never give us a name or contact information of who it was at Ancestry who was responsible for that decision). He was sent a link to this page and asked if Find A Grave staff were willing to do as much work as we did to make sure edits were accurate and made sense. No reply was ever received in answer to this question.

Find A Grave and Ancestry.com are not interested in the slightest in accuracy and quality control. They apparently just want to maintain their iron-fisted control of the site and memorials and pick and choose which policies they want to enforce and which they want to ignore.

Tropico Find A Grave Page
Forest Lawn Glendale Section Listings
Genealogy Date Discrepancy Research Tips
Find A Grave Naming Conventions Explained

Page first created 8 June 2015



Return to Genealogy Links
Return to Main Page

Contact us

© 2015 by Chris Mills