How To Ask For Memorial Transfers on Find A Grave
By Chris Mills
If I send you a link to this page because you left me a message asking if I was related to someone I created a memorial for, this is your answer. I'm not. I created over 440,000 memorials on find a grave and to the best of my knowledge I'm not related to more than 5,000 at most of those people.
The first thing you need to understand about asking for a memorial transfer on Find A Grave is that it must be approved by the current owner of the memorial, not the memorial creator. If they are not the same contributor appealing to the memorial creator for a memorial transfer is just a complete waste of time. Even if that contributor is still alive and still active on the site it will not do you a darned bit of good.
Beyond that, you don't want to ask for a memorial transfer from the controlling contributor's messages page, it is a lot more work for someone to transfer a memorial to you based on a message than it is for them to transfer to you if you've asked for it the right way, which is through the memorial itself.
By the way, I'm not beating up on people for not being able to follow find a grave's confusing and often contradictory policies. As someone from the software industry, I will tell you that find a grave's documentation sucks, and I'm not apologizing for them one bit. Actually, I do virtually nothing on the site anymore since they badly pissed me off. But, I digress ...
Here's how you should ask for a memorial transfer. Go to the memorial for the person you want to ask for a transfer of. Find the Suggest Edits box and click on it. On the next page, close to the bottom, there is another box labelled "Suggest other corrections". Click on that box.
If the contributor has their email address set to be visible it will be displayed on the screen and you will be told you can email them directly. DON'T DO IT unless you have already tried to contact them through the memorial and failed. This is find a grave trying to keep traffic off their system and by god, they own the whole site, so they should be willing to pay the price for owning it.
Within the message box, type your message. It can be as simple as "I am asking for a transfer of this memorial because this person is my ... (fill in the blank here)". If you want to get a copy of the email sent to you as well, check the box that says "Send me a copy of this email". Then hit the Send Message button
In practice, there is something else you need to consider. Find A Grave has what they call "transfer guidelines". I'm sure they originally came up with these to minimize infighting between contributors but it has also morphed into a mechanism whereby they will eventually directly control most of the memorials on the site (it will take decades for that to happen, but the trend is obvious).
The transfer guidelines state that a contributor is only obliged to transfer a memorial (if they themselves are not related to the deceased) to another contributor if that contributor is a direct descendant of the deceased, up through four generations. Sounds like it makes sense, which it does on some level.
Note, however, that the wording does not include aunts, uncles, cousins of any flavor, or any relation through marriage.
Back when I controlled a lot of memorials I never paid any attention to the transfer guidelines, I would transfer a memorial to someone if I thought that person would take care of the memorial and hopefully add more information to it. I would rather give a memorial to a complete stranger who was going to add something to it than a direct descendant who was going to sit on the memorial and do nothing. Unfortunately many contributors on the site do not share that philosophy and hew to the exact transfer guidelines as promulgated in the site FAQs.
Anyway, my point with this long winded ramble is that when you ask for a transfer if you are honest and you are not a direct descendant of the person you are asking for, your request can be turned down. My take on this is that since some of the site administrators are complete assholes (as are some of the contributors) when in doubt you may want to lie about your relationship to the deceased to ensure that the memorial is transferred to you.
I'm adding this paragraph in late 2020, after some new information came my way. Find A Grave has revamped the way they handle transfer requests for memorials they manage. Note, this is only memorials managed by find a grave, not memorials managed by individual contributors. For those memorials you still need to follow the steps above.
For instructions on asking for memorials controlled by Find A Grave (and this article explains how to tell if a memorial IS controlled by Find A Grave) click on the link below and it will take you to the article.
Asking for transfers of memorials managed by Find A Grave
Find A Grave now controls almost seven million memorials on the site directly, under member number 8 (the non famous memorials owner). These are just memorials they control directly, they probably indirectly control millions of other memorials that were created by contributors who passed away or were booted off the site. It wouldn't surprise me within another five years if they control more than 15 or 20 million memorials. They cannot adequately maintain this many memorials but they have actively obstructed attempts made by contributors to take care of large groups of memorials (such as banning all group accounts in 2015).
I suspect originally they viewed directly and indirectly controlling so many memorials as something they didn't want to do, but I believe since Ancestry bought them out in 2013 that the policy has changed and they are actively seeking to eventually control most if not all of the memorials.
I'm also adding this paragraph in late 2020. It's possible Find A Grave has rethought that policy. It's hard to say since the site is such a black box. Here's a link to another article I just wrote with some speculations as to what, if anything, the new transfer procedure might mean in terms of find a grave policies. It could be they have actually gotten a case of indigestion from the massive number of memorials they ingested over the past several years.
In any event, I have washed my hands of the whole thing. I have been working on my own online database for the last three years, it just went live last year but I still have a great deal of work to do on it. I am hoping later this year to set it up so other people can log in and add and update people records. If you're interested contact me and I'll explain how to look at it (for now) and hopefully how to contribute later on when I get that code working.
Page created 16 August 2018
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