Why You May See Less of Chris Mills On Find A Grave
And
A Not So Modest Proposal

By Chris Mills

I have been a member of the website Find A Grave for almost six years now. A little over a year ago I jumped into the top rank of contributors (Top 10) with a project I did which I referred to as The Forest Lawn Project. I have been a booster of the site and been a big supporter in any way I could, I never gave them any money but I have given of my time and talents with no thought of compensation other than the happiness I felt from helping people find their families, loved ones or even acquaintances they were looking for.

I have looked at some of the sites where people have left complaints about Find A Grave. Some of those complaints have been left by people that are obviously just whiners who have nothing good to add to any conversation they are involved with. Others were from people that complained that Jim Tipton (the owner of Find A Grave) was making money off of violating the privacy of dead people (or something to that effect). I wasn't really too sympathetic to that argument either, since we do live in an (ostensibly) capitalist society and the right to privacy does end at death, as far as I am concerned. The complaints that I did put more credence in were complaints about the site administrators running roughshod over contributors and allowing some contributors to break the rules while arbitrarily enforcing them on other contributors. I had seen evidence of that behavior from time to time and did find it disturbing. But I had never let it stop me from doing work on the site.

I will say this much for Jim Tipton, his idea for a website like Find A Grave was brilliant, he was at the right place and the right time and he came up with a site that has been unbelievably successful in terms of mobilizing legions of volunteers to scour cemeteries all over the world to find burials that other people on the site were trying to find. My hat is off to him for that achievement.

There are some flaws at the heart of that achievement, however. And having been intimately involved with it for most of the last three years, they have become painfully apparent to me. They are not the reason I will no longer be a contributor on the site, however (we'll get to that later).

Find A Grave contributors have their statistics displayed in several different categories, from really significant ones (like numbers of memorials added) to really silly ones (number of fame rankings given). The biggies are memorials created, memorials maintained, photos posted, volunteer photos posted. I also see people competing to create famous memorials but I find that one a bit too ghoulish to really participate in, plus some of the admins who are vetting the famous memorials are complete jackasses so I was already boycotting that process. Lest I forgot, virtual flowers left are also another statistic that is tracked.

I believe the cancer that is slowly eating out the heart of Find A Grave is the concept of memorial ownership, although that is certainly not the only problem. There is a place on the site where they are handling it correctly, and I think that would be a model for how they should be handling it in other parts of the site. Memorials of servicemen and servicewomen buried in the National Cemeteries of the US were imported in large numbers in the early days of the site, you can tell these memorials because they all list US Veterans Administration as the memorial creator (which must have been an alias that the Find A Grave admins used for that project). I have found that almost invariably when you submit a correction on one of these memorials it is transferred to you within a few days. No questions asked, no muss, no fuss, if you have something to add to the memorial you add it and you're done. If you want to get rid of the memorial you then have to find someone else to transfer it too, hopefully some family member will come along to give the memorial to.

Since the site has had contributors for over 12 years, a certain number of the original contributors are now deceased. That is the case with Darlene Kingsbury, a gal who lived in or near Posey County, Indiana, who died in 2007. She put a number of my family members in. Since Find A Grave figured out she was deceased they updated her bio page and mentioned that if you want to submit updates on her memorials you need to contact Find A Grave directly. Now, I'm enough of a computer person to know that it would have been pretty trivial to set up her account in such a way that the Suggest A Corrections on her memorials would go directly to the admins at Find A Grave. In any event, a while back I sent an update on one of Darlene's memorials to the admins at Find A Grave, it was for my distant relative Julia Allyn Duckworth. I sent them links to Julia's father and her husband.

Since the site policies are that updates can be processed in as much as 30 days and the admins sometimes take a lot longer, I didn't hover over that memorial as if it were a baby duckling. However, I did check it about a month later. To my horror I realized the admins had linked John Duckworth, Julia's husband, as her mother and not her spouse. I then sent another email to the admins explaining the mistake. The next time I checked the memorial I realized they had added the link to John as her husband, but not deleted the link to him as her mother. This time when I sent the email to fix it I CC'd it to Jim Tipton and suggested that they handle memorials that were entered by deceased contributors the same way they handle the veterans' memorials imported by the "US Veterans Administration", that they transfer those to the contributor submitting the suggestion. I sent that email, I don't know, four or five months ago, maybe longer. Not only did I not get a reply from Jim Tipton, they have never fixed the links on Julia Duckworth's memorial. Did I piss off an admin by sending that email to Jim Tipton as well? Probably. Should they have used that as an excuse to leave an obvious error on someone's memorial? Never!

By the way, here's a link to Julia's memorial. Pretty embarrassing. After three tries at getting fixed and it going to Jim Tipton as well without resolution I think poor Julia is going to have to live with that messed up link forever. GOOD work, people!

Every contributor that dies or burns out and drops off the site effectively leaves the ownership of their memorials in the hands of the Find A Grave admins. You can get control of these memorials if you submit a transfer request to the admins and state your relationship to the deceased, as long as it falls within the transfer guidelines they are supposed to transfer it to you. I have no idea what will happen if two grandchildren of the same person ask for that person's memorial on the same day, how are they going to handle that? The original contributor might have cared nothing for the person whose memorial they entered, but they cared enough to create a memorial. Some of the admins on Find A Grave are very conscientious and do a good job, but some of them aren't and don't. I could be harder on them but for all I know some of them are unpaid volunteers like the contributors are, I honestly don't know. Or they could be getting paid minimum wage, who knows?

One of the attractions about the website has always been some of the extra features, being able to link people to the memorials of their relatives, add photos, add bio sections, etc. This is something the dry cemetery transcription sites are never going to have. And Find A Grave will always be useful as a graves registration site. But the more memorials there are that fall into the hands of the admins, the more the contributors distrust each other because the site policies are pitting them at odds with each other, the more the admins indulge in petty and vindictive behavior because they take a dislike to a contributor, these problems all eat away at the heart of those extra features and are slowly sucking the soul out of the site (although it may be a conceit to even think it ever had one).

There are other memorials as well created by contributors who appear to be alive (and I fervently hope some of them are, because I collaborated with them and liked them and hope nothing bad happened to them) whose email addresses work but who don't respond to edit requests any more. Even though they've "gone dark" as it were, I still have to wait 30 days before forwarding their edit requests to Find A Grave, just on the off chance they start handling edit requests again. Although, after reading what I've written here, I'm thinking they just came to the same conclusion I did and walked away, as if from a chapter in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged.

I'll pass along a couple more anecdotes and then cut to the dénouement of our sad little tale. While I was working on The Forest Lawn Project, as part of the information I had downloaded from the California Death Index I had captured the birth and death places for literally hundreds of thousands of people. If there were an automated way for me to upload that information to Find A Grave it could have saved God only knows how many hours of work on updating the memorials I was planning on creating. I forget what email address I sent my inquiry to, but imagine my surprise when I got an email from Jim Tipton assuring me that any memorials I uploaded en masse could be batch updated.

I went ahead and uploaded my memorials and didn't think any more about it until I emailed Jim and asked him how we could proceed with updating those memorials. I have never heard back from him again, and that was about a year ago. I did ask him about it again because of another oddly amusing incident that happened a few months after that, but again, no response (I have actually mentioned this in my page on The Forest Lawn Project, that a batch update option was promised before I uploaded my memorials, but never delivered. I think I can confidently say that after a year I don't think it's going to happen).

At a certain point I was updating memorials either based on emails I was getting or on something I was looking at from the California Death Index (which means I probably already had the information in my database but there was no way to batch update it in Find A Grave), and I thought about how nice it would have been to have had that batch update utility. I have no idea how busy Jim Tipton is or isn't. And I have no idea how long it would have taken for him to come up with that utility, if it were possible. And I'm sure it was possible, based on what I know of databases. But my time is not the same as Jim Tipton's time. I'm guessing that if Jim Tipton were to think about the relative value of our time, a thousand hours of my time isn't worth one hour of his time. Oh, but silly me, why would I even be so conceited as to think Jim Tipton would even think about the value of my time, I'm just a nobody! I know at that point a little bit of the luster wore off. Getting so many thank yous from family members of people I created memorials for has helped a lot, but I can safely tell you at that moment in time I swallowed a bitter pill.

I was going to upload those memorials either way. Imagining I wouldn't would be as absurd as a virgin bride complaining the morning after her wedding night that her husband had debauched her. I don't know if Tipton lied to me about the batch update because he was trying to seal the deal, or if he actually intended to create that utility, and just never got around to it. People lie all the time in business, and for Tipton this is business, and maybe nothing more than that now. If that's the case I feel sad for him, because I think it must have taken some passion and fire and a lot of work to get the site going, and if he's lost the first two of those now then he's lost part of his life.

Oh, the oddly amusing but scary incident I have to share with you ... This must have happened last August based on the dates of the replacement memorials I created, although the memory of the exact date has escaped my mind and I'm not going to bother going back and look at my emails. Again, I forget how I discovered this, but I noticed some of my memorials in Forest Lawn Glendale were getting scrambled. Birth dates and death dates and middle names and plot information were getting scrambled. I went back and looked at my database and the entries were fine in my database, but they no longer matched what was on Find A Grave. I think I went back and looked at my input files and they were fine too. I was scratching my head trying to figure out what happened. I finally figured it out. Find A Grave was playing around with a record merge utility for duplicates, and they hadn't tested it out properly. They had started merging people together in Glendale (which by then had over 200,000 memorials in it because of my mass uploads) and they merged memorials together for people with the same first and last names and same birth and death years. However, they didn't check for the presence of other dates (month and day), different middle names, different plot numbers, or anything else that might have clued them in that these were NOT in fact the same people. I found eighteen memorials they had caused to disappear and I immediately emailed Jim Tipton and told him what they were doing wrong. I never got a response from that email either, but at least they stopped running that stupid merge utility, at least with those parameters. To the best of my knowledge that particular problem has been nipped in the bud, but I don't know for sure. Again, like I said, I never got a reply to that email either.

I ended up replacing eighteen memorials over that little peccadillo. I'm just glad I had copies of the data and was able to reconstruct them. Most contributors on the site wouldn't be that fortunate. But that incident scared me also. Any memorial you create on Find A Grave could be deleted at any moment, for any reason, or no reason at all. Or, as in this case, by mistake, because of a poorly constructed update query that might have destroyed and corrupted hundreds or even thousands of memorials on the site. All I know about were the ones that I found, but that was only in one cemetery.

Anyway, a few months ago I set up a separate account on the site to handle my family members that I had entered and started transferring them from my main account to that account. I didn't try and hide what I was doing, if I had thought about it I might have checked the FAQs on the site and if I had I would have been more circumspect about it. In any event, I didn't and I wasn't. So it was that last Monday I was up early and I noticed an email from the administration at Find A Grave. It informed me that a second account had been found in my name and that the two accounts had been merged together. The email purported to be from AJ Marik, who is a longtime member of the site and listed as a "Senior Administrator". I replied to the email and told them that was a very bad idea and couldn't they read, and that if it caused a problem the account could be renamed. I got a pretty fast reply back, "Rules are rules, Chris, and they apply to you just like everyone else on the site." I'm paraphrasing here, but I'm pretty sure that's almost word for word. At that point I didn't bother responding to "AJ" or whoever was replying from his email address. It might have actually been him, but by that point I didn't give two hoots in hell who it was. I forwarded the email to Jim Tipton and I basically told him in light of my contributions to Find A Grave could he "throw me a bone on this one".

That email was sent three days ago. I'm pretty sure they're not going to back down on this, no matter how insane or irrational their rules are. The idea that someone who has entered almost a half million memorials might be worthy of some kind of dispensation is just not going to occur to the people running the site because they are that stupid and corrupt. I'm not sure if Tipton even knows what goes on any more, and maybe he doesn't want to know. Once I do what I'm going to do Tipton will be aware of it after that, but their response is going to be pretty predictable, they're going to suspend my account. And that means I'm not going to have to maintain any of my memorials, oh my god, what am I going to do with all of my free time then?

There is a bit of humor in the irony of unintended consequences here. I only hope the admin who merged my accounts is the first to see all my SACs when they start coming in. It would almost be worth it all to see the look on the dumb MF's face when they figured out what they had unleashed.

I am sorry for the people who are going to want edits and transfers on those memorials. I am just happy for them that at least they know where their loved ones are buried, and once they know there's not a whole lot that Find A Grave can do to spoil that. I know most of those memorials are still going to be there because if too many of them get deleted Tipton won't make any money off of sponsorships for them, and you can bet your bottom line on the memorials staying put for that reason if for no other.

Anyway, for the meantime I am tidying up my affairs on the site, copying down the link info from my friends list and copying the memorial numbers from all my virtual cemeteries into other media. Find A Grave doesn't make it easy to leave, but leave I will nonetheless. I mean, it is possible they won't suspend my account, but unlikely. I hope Tipton has money in the budget to hire more of his flying monkey admins, since they may have enough work just from my SACs to hire another person (I get over 20 SACs almost every day and some days I have gotten over 50 in one day). Maybe it's faster for them to update the memorials if they are local to the server, it can't be any slower than what I have to put up with, and we have a decent speed internet connection at my residence.

Anyway, enough whining. It's easy to complain, it's much harder to solve problems than it is to just go on and on about how bad things are. The second part of this series is in the link below, and it has some ideas I have about what I'd like to see in a site that would do some of the same things that Find A Grave does, but operated by gravers and genealogists who actually care about the people they're dealing with and KNOW they're not the only graves registration site on the internet.

11 March 2013: I wrote the above section on 7 March, posted it, and sent a link to it off to some other gravers I know. The next day I posted some of my thoughts on how a site like Find A Grave could work.

Got some interesting responses back. Some people were egging me on, some were urging caution, others urged me not to go jousting at windmills. Some were basically just telling me not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as the old saying goes. Some people think there is only room for one site on the internet like Find A Grave. I beg to differ. One thing I know about genealogists, as a class of people, is that they are very particular and very finicky and detail-oriented and persnickety and anal-retentive. And what I take away from that is that if there is a site out there that works better for them than Find A Grave, some people will use it. So I still believe, in theory, that an alternative site with some of the features that I outlined in the article linked below is feasible. Pragmatically, it will be difficult to get such a site off the ground. That doesn't mean that I or some other enterprising nut won't manage to pull it off.

One person urged me to delete the rant I posted earlier (this article) and forget about the whole thing. I won't do that. For one thing, the problems with Find A Grave are not just going to go away. I now think I can solve some of my problems with the site, as I will discuss below, but there are bigger problems that just aren't going to go away. And there is a huge level of frustration on the part of some of the other contributors I have had contact with, a large part of which seems to stem from the fact that the site has outgrown the ability of the site admins to manage it. My own addendum to that is that if the site admins were actually worrying about responding to edit emails from contributors instead of pursuing nasty little vendettas against everyone who breaks some trivial rule that shouldn't even exist, the site would work much better. But I don't know, it may just be too big and unwieldy no matter what happens.

One thing that I realized after writing the first part of this article is that I could save some of my memorials from God only knows what fate by transferring them to relatives of mine who are on the site, and ask them to safeguard the memorials until this whole thing works itself out one way or another. So I have started doing that. If the site admins start tracking down my relatives and messing with their accounts, then I will know the site is completely beyond redemption and has fallen into the hands of Sauron (if you're a Tolkien fan, anyway). If that happens (which seems unlikely) at that point I will fight back with everything I've got and it will be all-out jihad. But again, I don't think that's very likely. I spent a while last night going over the Find A Grave Frequently Asked Questions with a fine tooth comb. I learned some things I hadn't realized before. Did you know, for example, that if you no longer want to maintain a memorial, you can transfer it to member number 8? That is a Find A Grave account apparently set up just to maintain memorials that other members no longer want to maintain. As a test I transferred one of my memorials to it, someone who probably should have been nominated as a Famous Memorial but I won't do it because of the blockheads that are vetting those memorials. His name was Horace Albright, a former director of the National Park Service. I have already updated his memorial as much as I could, and no family member has appeared to claim it. I'm not sure how edits are processed on these memorials that Find A Grave is managing under this account (there are currently almost 255,000 parked there) but I will do some experimentation and see.

Obviously, I don't want to manually transfer around 400,000 memorials to Find A Grave, but the FAQs also state that you can have all of your memorials in a particular cemetery transferred to Find A Grave to maintain, or to another contributor if you find someone else who is willing to maintain the memorials. I am investigating that possibility now, and if that is the case I will be able to shed some of my burden but still maintain control of the memorials of my family members that I don't want to lose. I guess I will update this page again when I have more information on how that works and how well it works. Doing these batch transfers does involve the cooperation of Find A Grave, so if they just ignore the emails requesting such transfers there is not going to be anything I can do to force them to deal with it. If it has reached that point, however, it means the site is in worse shape than I realized, and I'm not going to make that assumption unless I do send out these emails and literally get no answer back. For now I am going to assume that a batch transfer can take place and that it will work. Since I don't want them to take all of the memorials I am managing in these cemeteries, however, I am going to have to figure out a way to get them out of the way during the process. I guess I will have to park them with relatives while this is going on, since I know that any attempt to set up a second account in my name, for whatever reason, will be foiled by the authorities if they discover it.

In any event, updates will be posted here as I find out more information. Stay tuned!

Part II - A Not So Modest Proposal

What's up? A Year Later

I started this page on 7 March 2013, and finished updating it on 11 March 2013. I left a lot of stuff dangling on this page, in terms of what ended up happening with my Find A Grave accounts and memorials. Well, it is almost a year later, and there is some good news to report, I am happy to say.

By the way, if you are reading this directly after coming from the latest iteration of my Forest Lawn Project page (updated most recently in March 2014), you will see some stuff that has already been mentioned on that page, so feel free to skim over anything here that looks like you've read it already. There is a certain amount of cross-pollination between these two pages, and if I ever have an excuse to combine them into one article, I will definitely cut out some of the redundant information.

For starters, it is feasible to bulk transfer memorials to another Find A Grave contributor, and I successfully did so numerous times last year. My Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills and Forest Lawn Covina entries were transferred to FAG member Misty & Company, who were willing to maintain them. I also transferred about 5,000 memorials I had created in the Marysville Kansas cemetery to them as well. My Inglewood Park Cemetery memorials were transferred to B.J. Waters, and a number of memorials I had created in northern Kentucky were transferred to Lynn Fischer.

I created a new Find A Grave account called Tropico Gravers just for the Forest Lawn Glendale memorials, and found two other contributors who were willing to help me with maintaining the account, Kathy Salazar and Romper90069. I was very careful setting up this account because I did not want some overly zealous Find A Grave admin to decide that "Tropico Gravers" was just an alias for me and undo all the work I did setting up the account and transferring most of my Glendale memorials over to it. Several months later I set up another group to handle my Forest Lawn Cypress and Forest Lawn Long Beach memorials, that group is called South Coast Grave Minders. I had intended to help out with that group the way I have with Tropico Gravers, but I was unable to do so. However, they seem to be thriving on their own without any further involvement on my part, so it seems my involvement is not actually necessary.

As a result of those transfers, my own personal Find A Grave account only has control of about 11,500 memorials now, which means I don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about SACs and edits on these memorials. I am not related to all of the people I keep memorials for on my account, but I am related to a much higher percentage of them than I was for all the other memorials which I gave away ownership of.

Find A Grave did a decent enough job of transferring out the memorials I requested, except for some of the transfers apparently being forgotten about until I forwarded the emails to another Find A Grave admin I had dealt with who was apparently more conscientious than some of the other ones.

The reason that other contributors were willing to take so many of the memorials and I was able to find people to help me with some of the other memorials, as far as I can tell, came down to the concerns I expressed earlier in this page. Nobody, absolutely nobody, wanted this many memorials to fall into the hands of the Find A Grave admins, because at that point in time the admins were so overworked that customer service on the site had just gone right into the toilet. I was willing to come out and say it, and I knew that wasn't going to get me any brownie points with the site management if it got back to them, but this was the truth.

With all the bullshit that had happened, I know there were a few times that Kathy and Romper thought I was going to drop out of Tropico and leave them to deal with it all by themselves. However, i didn't, and we were able to keep the fire going. A few of the things I was pissed off abut got cleared up. I never bothered putting through another edit for Julia Duckworth's memorial back in Posey County, but at some point Emily Moore did (a distant relative of mine who is also on Find A Grave) and the admins finally fixed the messed up links on Julia's memorial.

I think what finally turned the corner for me, although I didn't realize it at the time, was the rollout of the enhanced edit system. Find A Grave first offered it to the Top 50 memorial creators, and then several months later they pushed the system out to all the users on the site. The new edit system split the edits into different categories, most of which (Dates and places, name fields, plot/GPS, and marker transcription) can be directly edited by the SAC submitter, all the memorial owner has to do is to accept the edit and it is processed somewhat magically.

There are three things that aren't covered by the new edit system, those are bio section updates, family links, and any other request or question, including transfer requests. I am absolutely certain they are working on a way to add the family links to the new edit system, I'm guessing it's just going to take some more work because it may be kind of tricky to program.

The new edit system is really, really good for two reasons. One, it makes it a lot easier to run through the edits which fall within the parameters of the new system. So if you are maintaining a lot of memorials, it is a huge help. It's a bit more work for the person submitting the edit, but I for one prefer it for some of the edits, if someone has fouled up the names on a memorial (like putting the surname in the maiden name field, for example), I don't have to try and explain to them know what they did wrong, I just put the edit through and if there is any questions I send them a separate SAC or leave them a message explaining why they need to just accept that edit.

The other really neat thing is that this is a major solution to a problem I discussed at some length earlier on this page, nonresponsive memorial owners. I don't know exactly how it works, but it is clear from observations I and other contributors have made over the last several months since the new edit system has been working, that the Find A Grave admins can "push" edit changes for any user on the site, so if someone has passed away or just abandoned their memorials, much of the information can be updated anyway as long as the FAG admins are aware they need to make sure that a particular user's memorials need to be updated. I don't know if this is something they can set up as a batch process, but it wouldn't surprise me if this is so.

Unfortunately, I still don't think this will work for bio page updates or family links, I think you still have to send those out, make sure you check the box that says to email you a copy of the update, then turn around and forward it to the admins at Find A Grave.

So the new edit system has definitely improved my feelings about the site. It doesn't solve all the issues, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

That being said, you still need to be careful in putting those edits through. If an edit doesn't look right to you, you should check it and make sure the person who submitted the edit isn't mistaken about something and is giving you wrong information. With the previous system, you had to bring up the memorial to edit it, and if someone gave you contradictory information that didn't look right based on what you saw on the memorial, you could just not put through that edit and ask the person some questions. You also have the option of ignoring or declining edits with the new system, but you need to pay attention since you're not actually looking at the memorial, although you can click on a link from the edits page to go to the memorials. So, all I'm saying is, be careful!

Some other interesting things have happened. I mentioned above that I had noticed in the summer of 2012 that one of the Find A Grave admins had tried to run a merge/purge utility against Forest Lawn Glendale that had fouled up and corrupted a few dozen memorials located in that cemetery. Well, I thought we had put that particular problem to bed after I had sent an irate email to Jim Tipton about it, but apparently not. In September 2013 they tried running the exact same utility, with the exact same results. This time I was prepared for it, however, I had set up a virtual cemetery as a "canary in a coal mine" and from time to time I monitored it to make sure nothing untoward had happened. The virtual cemetery had about 70 different memorials listed, and if everything was correct I would be able to look at it and clearly see the 70 different names. If, however, Find A Grave ran their flawed merge utility again, instead of seeing 70 different names in the virtual cemetery, I would see 35 names listed twice, and that's exactly what happened last September.

I did some spot checking and verified that they had in fact merged a bunch of different people's memorials together (not that there was much doubt in my mind after seeing what had happened to the virtual cemetery). I had stored a list of the memorial numbers that might be affected on my computer, figured out which memorials were still there and which ones had been merged out of existence, then sent it in an email to AJ Marik and a couple of the other admin email addresses at Find A Grave. After the run-in I had with AJ earlier last year, I wasn't too thrilled about getting him involved, but I did know one thing about AJ. He has relatives buried at Forest Lawn Glendale, a lot of the memorials he created were in that cemetery, and I figured he cared about Forest Lawn as much as anyone on the site does, and more than most.

I got a reply back from AJ, I believe within a day. He was able to restore the memorials that had been merged out of existence. I had to clean some of the memorials up because some of the information in them had been corrupted during the merge process, but because I had all the information (or most of it) within my database it wasn't too big a job to clean it up.

AJ agreed with me that it was pretty obvious that the memorials were for different people. He gave me the email address of the person at Find A Grave who had actually run the merge utility and asked me when I had time to email her and explain to her exactly why those memorials shouldn't have been merged together and what to look at to make sure in the future that she would in fact be getting rid of real duplicates, not merging the memorials for different people together. I will not reveal the identity of that person here, I don't think it would do any good to publicly humiliate her. I didn't get around to writing that email until close to the end of the year, but I did finally send it to her. Hopefully this will be the last time I will have to deal with that particular problem at Forest Lawn Glendale, but who knows?

In any event, that particular incident, if badly handled, just would have soured me even more on Find A Grave, but because it was handled pretty well it made me feel better about the site. It also zeroed out AJ's slate with me, as far as I was concerned. I felt like I had been badly treated by him (or whomever was sending out email on his behalf) back in March, but the way this problem was handled took care of what I perceived was the bad karma from the previous incident.

I forget why I was poking around in the Find A Grave FAQs last December, but I found something very interesting there. It was an announcement that in September 2013 Find A Grave had been acquired by Ancestry.com. The announcement stated that Find A Grave would not be run any differently, it would continue to be a free site, but that Find A Grave would now have the resources of Ancestry behind it as far as providing better customer service, more resources in terms of enhancing the site, etc. After reading the announcement I decided that it probably was a win-win for all concerned. Find A Grave had clearly been suffering from not having either the people resources to handle everything the admins were being tasked with, and the financial resources necessary to enhance and upgrade the site. The jury is still out but I suspect that long-term, the marriage between the two businesses will prove good for both, and I think it will be good for the users of both Find A Grave and Ancestry.com

I still have a few gripes about Find A Grave now, but not as many. For one thing, I wonder if they got rid of the person who was in charge of vetting Famous Memorials, or gave him a different job to do? I have spoken to other long-time contributors on the site about the famous memorials, and one of them told me that the guy who was vetting the famous memorials was the butt of jokes and derision by other Find A Grave staff. Apparently he either had too many emails to go through and just couldn't do it, or was just completely out of his depth with the famous memorials, and had no idea what he was doing.

I still have my pet peeve about the burial unknown memorials and how they can just be plopped into the right cemetery with no warning, and no clue on the part of many of the memorial owners that if someone else has created a known good burial memorial for a person before someone else plopped their burial unknown memorial, that the memorial that had the burial location first is in fact the original memorial, no matter when the burial unknown memorial was created. Maybe at some point in the future Find A Grave will put in some kind of checking routine that could automatically sweep burial unknown memorials into the right cemetery if a match is found, but give credit to the contributor who found the right cemetery first. But, if they do that, the routine needs to work better than their duplicate checking utility which can combine different people's memorials together by accident.

I would still like to set up a website that does some things differently than Find A Grave, but I think I have purged from my system the motivation of doing it out of revenge on Find A Grave.

I have taken a baby step in that direction, although what I have done is nowhere near as ambitious as what I laid out on my Modest Proposal page. I decided it would be useful to start publishing section listings for Forest Lawn Glendale with all the names that were found on the Forest Lawn site, not just the ones who had Find A Grave memorials. I started working on this last December, and have published about a quarter of the sections in Glendale, and about two thirds of the people's names. The listings are broken out by section, then organized by lot and/or space (although some of the sorting is wonky because of some of the lot numbers that Forest Lawn has created). Where I know a Find A Grave memorial is associated with a person, I have added a link from my pages that goes to that Find A Grave memorial.

I've always liked looking at section listings that are laid out that way, it can be so much easier to find relatives of a person if you are seeing the names laid out in an order that corresponds to the lots and spaces. But having the links embedded to the Find A Grave memorials is handy, too.

Those pages are also making it easier for me to keep my database of Forest Lawn entries up to date, as other Find A Grave contributors can send me information about people completely independently of the Find A Grave system. So far, the new pages are working out very well from that standpoint, and also making it easier for some people to do photo requests and other marker photography.

So, that's really all I have to say about the subject for now. I'm glad to end this post on a much more positive note than the original one. I was so mad when this stuff happened a year ago that I was just fuming. And I'm hoping that since Jim Tipton isn't spending so much time worrying about how to keep the site going that he is busy thinking of ways to make it better.

Hey, what's this I'm seeing about a Find A Grave mobile app? Will have to check that out, that might be a really cool thing to be able to use when you're out in the middle of a cemetery trying to look something up ...


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Page First Posted: 03/07/2013 19:49:08

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