Whale By The Tail - Find A Grave, the mechanics of caring for the information of millions of dead people, and why passionate amateurs are better at some things than paid drudge workers
By Chris Mills
Once upon a time, I loved genealogy. I had an account with Ancestry Dot Com, I went to cemeteries and graveyards every chance I got, and I created hundreds of thousands of memorials on the Find A Grave website.
Out of the above paragraph, clauses one and three still apply, but not two and four. This is because, in August 2015, Find A Grave decided that they could deactivate any "group" account that was on their site, and if a user had more memorials than any one person could humanly handle, well that wasn't find a grave's problem. Since group accounts were the obvious answer to having to maintain large numbers of memorials and find a grave abruptly outlawed them, in a rather short period of time the site ended up gaining control of (my guess) millions of memorials created by people who would no longer take care of them if they had to do it alone.
Find A Grave was no stranger to controlling millions of memorials. In the early days of the site they had created lots of memorials prior to having any kind of substantial user base. Any time you see a memorial that was created by the "Utah State Historical Society" or the "US Veterans Affairs Office", these were created by Find A Grave early on in its existence.
Having been one of the people that walked away from maintaining hundreds of thousands of memorials when I would no longer be allowed to take care of them properly, I made a prediction in an article I wrote and published on this website two years ago.
"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."
Something else I mentioned in that article I will paraphrase here, and add a bit more dramatic verbiage. The find a grave "transfer guidelines" as they were being implemented were going to turn into a kind of doomsday machine and end up causing find a grave itself to end up controlling the vast majority of the memorials on the website within 20 to 30 years from now.
You can say to yourself, who gives a shit what happens 20 or 30 years from now? Who indeed? You and I and everyone reading this page today could be worm food in 20 or 30 years. But for those who have spent so much time documenting and remembering those who have passed on, the care of this information is in its own way just as vital a task as caring for the mortal remains of those who are gone.
Some of my anger at Find A Grave was also transferred to Ancestry Dot Com, which owns them. I had kept up a paid Ancestry account for years and years but finally let it go in 2016 or 2017. It wasn't that I wouldn't have used it, but I got most of the same functionality using Family Search Dot Org, and I had the satisfaction of knowing I wasn't paying money to support a company which I thought was at least indirectly responsible for some pretty reprehensible behavior.
After I wrote the article in 2018 predicting that Find A Grave was going to end up controlling 15 to 20 million memorials in the next few years, I would occasionally amuse myself by seeing how many memorials they controlled at any given time. At its peak that number went over 10 million, that was at some point in the last year.
I then noticed the number started going down. It's now down under nine million again. Or is it?
I have known lots of people on the site, one of them was a guy named Tim Cook who was a veritable geyser of information on WWII aircrew who died both in combat and in ferry and training accidents. I had transferred some memorials to him at different times knowing they were going to be in good hands.
In the last year he stopped responding to my emails so I went to his find a grave profile to see if anything showed up there. I was a bit horrified by what I found on his page. There was nothing overt that bothered me, but I realized something when I started looking at the memorials that he supposedly was maintaining. His main page showed that he still controlled something like 90% of the memorials he had created but when I went to look at individual memorials I found that they were all controlled by find a grave. Literally all of them.
Find A Grave now controlled all of Tim's memorials, but his user page statistics no longer reflected that. And, I suspect, the find a grave house account page no longer reflects reality in its numbers either.
Look, if Tim stopped responding to emails and no longer responded to people on the site, Find A Grave had a right to take over his account. But why in God's name did they obfuscate the fact that they now controlled his memorials?
My suspicion with Tim is that he has either passed away or something has happened to him that has made him unable to do anything on the computer. Maybe what Find A Grave has done is to temporarily seize his account, and if he shows up again in the next few years, they will give it back to him. Who knows?
Getting back to the topic at hand, the thing that I intuitively realized over the last five years was that it was completely insane and irrational for find a grave to take over all these memorials or even want to take them over, because Find A Grave was never in a position to take care of these memorials properly, they just don't have enough people to do it.
I had first thought of the phrase "having a tiger by the tail". But that isn't really apropos, these memorials aren't going to reach out and maul the people trying to control them all. That's when I thought of having "a whale by the tail". It rhymes, and it makes sense. What in the hell do you do when you've caught a whale, what exactly do you do with it?
Sorry, another nautical analogy came to mind. It's the proverbial albatross around the neck from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Whether it's an albatross or a whale, I think Find A Grave may be having their banquet of consequences for the actions they took over the last five years. Outlawing the group accounts was one mistake, making a number of contributors so livid with anger that they fled the site was another, and having the hubris to think that Find A Grave staff were better positioned to care of these memorials than the people who created them was yet another.
The reason I think that Find A Grave has finally realized it was a mistake is because of something I figured out today. I had another transfer request from a contributor for a memorial I no longer control (seized by Find A Grave in 2015). I get several of these requests a month, without fail. So many so, that I have written a page on my website explaining to people how to ask for transfers of these memorials and explaining to them that since I no longer control the memorial that I can't transfer it to them.
I was going to send the contributor a link to the page where I explain this, but I had noticed some new verbiage on the Suggest Edits pages on Find A Grave recently and wanted to see if the procedure for asking for a memorial transfer had changed.
What I found out today was that for memorials that are controlled by individual contributors, those procedures have not changed. But for memorials controlled directly or indirectly by find a grave, the procedures are different now.
I tested this with one of the memorials that I had transferred to Tim Cook, who I mentioned above. If Tim isn't around to take care of this guy (who was killed flying with Tommy McGuire in the Philippines in January 1945) I wanted his memorial back. So I went to the memorial and clicked on the edits page.
It was breathtakingly simple. Something like three or four clicks later the memorial was transferred back to me.
I did some more testing and then found out for any of the Find A Grave house accounts, any memorial they control (other than the famous memorials, which are not treated the same way) can be transferred to any user as long as you read the text that says you'll take care of the memorial and transfer it to any relatives of the person if they show up. That's it. No "transfer guidelines", no "direct ancestor", no nothing. You just agree to take care of the memorial and transfer it if a relative comes along.
Why did it take Find A Grave so long to figure out what they were doing was so irrational? Or did they even figure it out or not?
I only control a little over 40,000 memorials now and I can take care of the direct edit requests pretty quickly, but I still get dozens and dozens of emails on those memorials every month. I shudder to imagine how many emails find a grave is getting.
And that's a problem. Maybe they thought those memorials were their property, their "asset", as it were. And since they sell advertising on the site, maybe the memorials are assets. But at what cost? For every thousand memorials you control, you're going to get X numbers of emails a month. Maybe one day they will have some AI program that will be able to handle those emails. But for now you need people to deal with them.
The stupid thing is that volunteers were dealing with them, people that weren't getting paid anything. And then they had to screw us so badly that a bunch of us stopped working on the site entirely.
Maybe Find A Grave has some volunteers on staff, but they definitely have some paid staff. And paid staff these days can cost some serious money.
The other problem is the old saying, once bitten, twice shy. I wanted Major Jack Rittmayer's memorial back because I created it and I knew who he was. But I have no interest in most of the 200,000 other memorials that I created in Forest Lawn Glendale that Find A Grave now has. Good for them that they've made it so much easier for people to request those memorials, but I'm certainly not taking many of them back.
I've spent a good chunk of the last five years feeling that I was at war with Find A Grave. I guess I'm ready for a truce. And I'm hoping they've finally figured out they really don't want to control all the memorials on the site.
Of course, it remains to be seen at this point as to whether it is even possible for Find A Grave to reverse course and stop the forces they have set in motion. Or is the site going to be drowned by an inexorable tide of unmanaged memorials which no one will take responsibility for or take ownership of?
I'm adding this paragraph and the following one the next morning, after I thought about this some more. It is possible that Find A Grave has not made any strategic change in course at all. Reconfiguring the system to allow automated transfers out of memorials they control may just be a tactical response to the fact that it was so time consuming for their personnel to go through those suggest a correction emails that were only asking for transfers and deal with them. I'm sure they were getting thousands of transfer requests every month, and possibly tens of thousands. And those numbers will keep going up as they control more and more memorials.
I guess it doesn't matter what their intentions are as long as they enact some policies that reflect reality and not some power-mad idiot's conception of reality which couldn't be farther from the truth. So I guess I'll leave it at that.
As I have said on another page, I washed my hands of Find A Grave five years ago. I do help out people on the site from time to time, but after being so pissed at the site management it was impossible to do much of anything on it or care about it. But oddly enough, I guess I still care on some level, although I'm not sure why.
BTW, if you want the specific instructions on how to ask for memorials that they control, the link is below:
Asking for transfers of memorials managed by Find A Grave
And by the way, AJ Marik, if you'd ever like to apologize to me for what you did five years ago, I'm all ears. I know, I know, you were just following orders. You can tell it to the fucking judge, OK?
There are some other crimes Find A Grave should answer for, but I'm old and cynical enough now (or some would say realistic enough) to realize that some crimes are never punished. It's like the end of the movie Chinatown, sometimes there's not a damned thing you can do.
As a last note, JFK, RIP. It is exactly 57 years since that fateful day in Dallas, Texas. It's all water under the bridge now but I wonder if things had turned out differently would we be living in a better world now, or not?
Page created 22 November 2020
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