The Find A Grave memorial naming conventions: what they are, why they exist, and why you should pay attention to them


By Chris Mills

I have felt compelled to write this article because of the large number of memorials I have found where the naming conventions have been ignored, and because as a contributor who works on two different Find A Grave accounts that currently have 244,000 memorials under management, every week I receive edits which would cause some of my memorials to violate the site naming conventions. So I would like to take a bit of time and explain the rules on naming and some of the rationales behind them.

First of all, the naming conventions are found in two different FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) on Find A Grave, topics 14 and topics 136. I`ve added the links below so you can read them for yourselves.

What are your memorial naming conventions?

Let`s start with the main article on naming conventions, as it appears on 7 February 2015. This is the exact text from the FAQs, I have formatted it slightly differently here, I have bolded the headers and italicized the actual text from the FAQ topics.

Memorial Naming Conventions

If a hyphen or an apostrophe is part of the name, use the punctuation.
Use a period after names where only an initial is known. If the full name is known, use the full name and not the initial.
Do not use any other punctuation within any Name Field.
Do not use Full capitalization (ALL-CAPS) of names in any Name Field.
Suffixes and Prefixes do not belong in any Name Field.

First Name

First name of the deceased. Put the entire first name (if known), even if the grave marker is only an initial. Do not include titles or other prefixes in the First Name field.

Middle Name

Middle name of deceased. Put the entire middle name (if known), even if the grave marker is only an initial.

Nickname

Nickname of deceased, if known; the nickname is automatically placed in quotes.

Maiden Name

Maiden name of a married individual, if known (otherwise leave blank); the maiden name is automatically italicized and is only used if the individual was married and took the spouse's last name as their new last name. If the deceased was never married, then the last name is placed in the "Last Name" field, NOT in the "Maiden Name" field.

Last Name

Last Name as you would find it on the tombstone, if the interred had more than one marriage or other possible spellings please place this information in the bio and use the family links. Do not include honorary or other suffixes in the Last Name field.

Here is the section on dealing with names for women who have been married multiple times.

How do I enter all married names for a woman's memorial when she was married more than once?

The 'last name' is the name that is on the headstone. Include other married names as part of the biography section. The 'maiden name' is only for her maiden name.

OK, that`s all of the actual verbiage from the FAQs I`m going to bore you with. Here are the problem areas, and why they end up being problem areas.

As far as initials having periods after them, this rule is honored more in the breach than the observance, as the old saying goes. Since it makes no difference when you are searching for initials whether they have a period after them or not, the rule itself is completely meaningless. If someone wants to send me edits and add periods after all the middle initials in my memorials, they are free to do so. In actual fact, almost no one cares, and visually it`s almost meaningless anyway. So this is a nonissue. You are supposed to add periods after initials but many people don`t and it doesn`t really matter.

As far as making the names upper and lower case, this is an issue, in some cases people have disabilities which make it difficult for them to change case while typing, and tend to type in all upper case or all lower case. This is enormously distracting when you are looking at memorials.

The second place where I see it a lot is where people capitalize surnames and maiden names in their memorials. I`m not sure where this got started or why it still persists, but again, it is enormously annoying visually. I will never accept an edit that changes a family name to all caps, no matter what field it appears in, and I think it is an appalling practice. And it is expressly forbidden by the naming conventions, it flat out says not to do it.

The naming conventions do allow dashes in names (usually in surnames but they can appear in other names), because occasionally people do combine names and hyphenate them. But it`s really not that often, at least in the US. You can even look at well known people, such as Hilary Rodham Clinton, and see that she shifted her maiden name to her middle name, she did not hyphenate the two together. Find A Grave has a place for the maiden names, it`s the maiden name field. And 99 times out of 100, that`s where it`s going to go.

The biggest problem with names on the site is with women who have been married multiple times. Contributors want the surname field to contain all the different married names that a woman has had. If you did that with someone like Liz Taylor you would have an absolute monstrosity of a surname field, it would be unbelievably long, complicated, and impossible to search on.

And that last point is why you are not supposed to do it. The point of making these memorials is not just so that you can keep track of your relatives and people you know. It`s also so that other people can find them and document them in their family trees and pay their respects to them. And, news flash, once you start concatenating multiple names together in the surname field, it becomes ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to find someone by searching for their name.

I`ll give you an actual example. There is a memorial in Forest Lawn Glendale for Ada Augusta (or Augustus) White Smith Dickey. Her marker says Dickey (her second husband) but if you search on her using the surname Smith, she will appear at the bottom of the list of names, under the other Smiths, which if you are not used to will cause you to miss her name. You can`t find her at all under Dickey. You can find her under Smith Dickey, but why would you even think of looking for someone with a name combined like that, especially once you realize the site rules say you`re not supposed to create memorials with names formatted like that?

By the way, just to show how ludicrous it gets when you start doing that, I searched the entire site for the surname "Smith Dickey" and all I came up with was her memorial. In other words, if you start doing stuff like this, you are making it much more difficult for people to find your memorials, virtually impossible in fact. And if you do that it`s not someone else`s fault if they start duplicating your memorials, it`s your fault because you made memorials that are very difficult for people to find, and easy to duplicate because you`ve made it so hard for them to come up in a search.

The site rules say to link women to the memorials of all their known husbands, if you can find them, and document anything you want about the order of the husbands or their names in the bio section. That`s what it says, and any other course that involves placing multiple married names in the surname field is flirting with disaster.

By the way, it appears to be a real sticking point as to which married name goes on the marker and also a memorial that is created for the person. Sometimes women who have been married multiple times have their first husband`s name on their marker, in other cases they have a second or third husband`s name on the marker. The FAQs say to match the name on the marker but the case could also be made that the surname should match the name that appears in the cemetery records or the legal surname at the time of death, i.e., what you would see in the social security death index or in state death index records. If you are creating memorials off of marker photos or transcriptions you are of course going to use the name on the marker, but if you are creating memorials off of written cemetery records you`re going to go with whatever they show, especially if you can find a corresponding social security or state death index record to back it up.

And by the way, Find A Grave trying to say as a rule that you always use the surname on the marker is a bit hypocritical, because an awful lot of the actresses who are listed as famous memorials on the site have their names on the memorials rendered as different names than what appeared on the marker, and there are a number of actors who are not buried under their stage names, but the Find A Grave memorials virtually always list their stage names. So I will be more than happy to follow that rule consistently if Find A Grave starts doing it themselves for their famous memorials. I have a personal beef with this one because I accidentally created a lot of memorials that duplicated famous ones because I had the legal names of people and added them to Find A Grave under their legal names, only to find out later that there were famous memorials for them under their stage names.

Getting back to the multiple married names problem, in some ways I think it would be better if Find A Grave added another name field for married women which would just be their prior married names. But then when I think about it I realize that way lies madness, because it would work fine for women that were only married twice, but once you got up to three or more spouses you`d start having the same problems you have with combining multiple surnames in the main surname field.

In any event, in a nutshell, if you sent me an edit trying to add multiple married names for someone in the surname field and I`m bouncing it, this is why. Most people that are doing that have never actually thought through the search process to realize why you shouldn`t do that. Since I`ve been on the site for almost eight years, I`ve got a lot of experience searching for memorials and I have a bit of insight into the pitfalls you can run into when you`re trying to find people and the surnames are not recorded in an easily searchable format.

Page created 7 February 2015

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© 2015 by Chris Mills