Search for people defined as famous by Find A Grave
This is a standard people search but it only searches people deemed as famous
Initially when I started this a few days ago, it only searched people that the Find A Grave website marked as famous. Fairly quickly I realized that was inadequate and added a second field to denote people as famous, which is independent from the find a grave famous field.
I will be updating the people screens so that they will show if a person has been marked as famous by find a grave or by myself (and presumably in the future other interested parties).
I first noticed the inadequacies of the Find A Grave famous person nomination system close to ten years ago, so I mainly washed my hands of it then. At that time the four biggest flaws were, in order, that the person who was doing the vetting for the famous memorials was an absolute idiot and had no idea what he was doing (I believe this has since changed).
Secondly, a memorial had to be nominated as famous when it was created (I know that has since been changed). So if someone was entered and the person entering the memorial didn't know the decedent was famous, that person languished in obscurity.
Thirdly, if when you nominated a memorial as famous the bio section didn't exactly correspond to the Find A Grave guidelines, the nomination was rejected. I have no idea if this has ever changed or not, but more people have learned to write bio sections that more or less follow the Find A Grave guidelines now.
Fourth, if no one looking at the memorial ever understands that the person should have been marked as famous, or cares enough to nominate them to be a famous memorial, that person never gets marked as famous, they never even get to the point where their memorial is vetted for being famous.
So, for that reason I added my own field for denoting a famous person. I grant you it's completely arbitrary, but really, so is the Find A Grave ranking. It seems like any two-bit actor, musician or politician can become famous on Find A Grave. But lord help you 10 years ago if you tried to get them to recognize a famous economist unless it was Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes (not that Keynes was really an economist, but people think he was).
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