Part I - Why You May See Less of Chris Mills On Find A Grave
A Not So Modest Proposal
By Chris Mills
If you have read the preceding piece in this series, you have been privy to my thoughts on some of the shortcomings of a certain website which shall at least momentarily remain nameless. I have looked at some other websites, hoping I would find somewhere else to park my memorials. One I had looked at previously but had dismissed, I briefly revisited just tonight to see if there had been any improvements. Sad to say, Interment.net is still a tiny shadow of the other sites, with dry listings and dates but so few names that it is hardly worth looking at. I randomly spot checked a few cemeteries and a few counties. I am amazed Interment.net is even still around, I`m not sure how they are getting enough money in to keep the server going it is housed on.
There was another site I had heard of, BillionGraves.com. They have an interesting twist, people take pictures with their cellphones with GPS turned on and upload the pictures, a team of people involved with the site then transcribes the names and dates from the markers. It`s an interesting idea but it doesn`t really fit in with the way I tend to do my name collecting. However, I do like the concept and think this may really take off at some point. But since it doesn`t dovetail with my ambitions at this point I`m going to file this away to look at again at a later date.
Another site, RestingSpot.com, has an interesting interface but seems pretty sketchy right now. I think it has some promise but right now I`m not sure it`s worth bothering with.
So let`s just move along and go into thought experiment mode here. If I were designing a graves registration website that can be used for genealogy research, what are some of the attributes that would be desirable? I did some brainstorming with my wife and we came up with some ideas.
For starters, I`m not sure what the pages would be called that each person would have. I don`t want to use the word "memorials", that is a F.A.G. term and I never particularly cared for it. "Record" seems too clinical. For now I may use the word "Profile", although it is so generic to seem almost meaningless. For now that`s what we`ll use, however.
Next up, as I mentioned it previously, having the profile creator retain full edit control over a record once it`s created is, as I think I`ve demonstrated with Find A Grave, a disaster waiting to happen. It`s a prescription for profiles to be created that will never have any value beyond graves registration because most of them will never be updated. I`m thinking some kind of Wiki type format where any registered user can edit a profile would be desirable, within limits. I would like the ability to lock data down in fields as the person`s profile becomes more and more detailed and documented. For instance, if you document that someone has a marker in a particular cemetery and you know the plot location, that data could be locked down immediately because that`s data which is easily proved if you have a picture of the grave marker and access to some of the cemetery records. You should usually then be able to lock down the name fields, although of course there are landmines waiting for the unwary there for people whose markers list their nicknames and not their given names or women whose markers don`t show their legal surnames at death but a prior married name.
I would not allow any anonymous users to edit the profiles, however. Wikipedia has allowed it for users in politically repressed countries to edit articles without fear of retribution from the authorities, but I don`t think that should be necessary on a graves registration or genealogy oriented website.
Speaking of names, that`s a real sore point to Find A Grave users, with good reason. Duplicates are created all the time on Find A Grave because a search by first name doesn`t search the nickname fields as well, and there`s no good way on F.A.G. to search for a woman`s prior married names. Sometimes they get tossed into the middle name fields, but then the order comes up all wrong when you spell out a name. It would be immensely helpful to be able to add prior married names and have those be searchable fields. Some of the contributors on F.A.G. make a real hash of it sometimes by creating these chimera surnames which never existed, hyphenating together multiple married names or inserting spaces or backslashes or other odd characters. Those are rightly forbidden by the F.A.G. naming conventions, but since there is no good alternative in the name fields the chimera names persist.
A gripe I have with F.A.G. is that they will list actors and actresses under their stage names and show the real name on the memorial but not make it searchable. You have no idea how many actors and actresses had memorials I accidentally duplicated because of that, since the cemetery and death records listed their legal names, not their stage names. Gotta be a way to add stage names and birth names and make them both searchable. Or give up on the actors and actresses and leave them to the celebrity stalkers on Find A Grave. But I'd kind of like to include them because it's sooo difficult to get a famous memorial updated on FAG and I think people would like to be able to find their parents and other relatives and create family links for those people as well. I don't want to discriminate against them just because they were "famous".
Let`s return from this digression into recording names. Here`s something I think would be extremely useful. I would like to be able to attach a brief source citation to any fact that is recorded in a profile. This would be optional but if there were discrepancies between two different sources I would like to be able to view both sets of information along with the sources attached to each. The sources could be all kinds of different things: state death indexes, the social security death index, census records, state birth records, cemetery records, interment books, draft records, church records, family bibles, cemetery ground readings, etc. I think I would allow family records as a source but it would not be considered as high quality a source as official records. Any sourced data would be considered superior to unsourced data if there were a conflict between the two sets of data.
I would think a freeform note field attached to every source would be adequate for more detail, i.e., you could have Federal Or State Census Records listed as a source category, and then type into the note field something like "1930 Federal Census" as an explanation. If there were enough room in the notes you could really go to town on it in the sense of being able to specify geographically where the census was taken and what census page the data was on.
From a data entry standpoint, I have what I think are some interesting ideas. I`d like to have a basic input form which would be fine for someone pulling names and dates off of marker photos without any other information. I`d like to be able to turn on an expanded profile by clicking on a radio button, perhaps. I would also like the option of being able to add the profile with all the fields being blank, but allow the user to create and modify a template record which could also be used as for adding a new profile. The advantage of a template would be for adding a number of people with the same surname, you could have that prefill from the template while you are adding those people. You could also use it to add a birth or death place that several people share, or prefill a cemetery lot if you have several people that are buried next to each other in the same lot or niche.
Speaking of cemetery lots, there is something I have been able to do with some specific cemeteries I have worked on because I was able to grab all the plot information and save it in a database. I would like to program this kind of functionality into a website. If a cemetery section and lot is specified, I would like the users to be able to click on that section or lot and pull up a list of people buried next to each other (in the case of a lot or plot). The section might or might not be that useful, I know some of the sections in some cemeteries I have worked on have fifteen or twenty thousand people buried in that section, but usually don`t have more than eight people buried in a single lot. That would be a wonderful tool for figuring out if a wife who had remarried was buried next to her husband who predeceased her, or finding a daughter who was married with an unknown married name. This particular feature I think is tremendously exciting, I can`t think of a single website out there that will let you do that. Some of the plain text interment listings I have found have listed people in order by the rows they are in, but those aren`t actual databases so you don`t have those features available on those pages, I would like to have the best of both worlds.
I don`t know if this is feasible or not but I would like to be able to have reminder triggers so that the site could email you when a significant date was approaching for someone you had entered a profile for (birthday, date of death, wedding anniversary, other significant date). I think this would be a really cool feature but I don`t know how hard it would be to implement. My wife would like to expand on that so that dates could also set using a Hebrew Calendar so that a yahrzeit (which is not going to follow the same date in the Gregorian calendar each year) could be tracked.
Speaking of dates, that`s a whole `nother can of worms there, but an interesting one. Most sites like this you can only enter two dates, birth and death, and enter the full dates or only partial dates. F.A.G. lets you enter a marriage year on spouse links but that`s only used for sorting spouses in the right marriage order, that information isn`t displayed unless you are a memorial owner and go into edit mode on the relationship links. I`d like to track all kinds of different dates, and if this were to go anywhere I think I would like to speak to clergy of different religions to see what kind of dates people from different religions would like to be able to keep track of for something like this. Obviously, things like christenings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, confirmation, burial dates are all things that could be tracked.
I don`t know if this would be impossible to implement or not but I would also like to be able to use more vague dates for certain fields, something you can do in Ancestry but not In F.A.G., circa/about qualifiers and date ranges (before, between, after) for approximate dates that just aren`t known with as much certainty. I would also like to be able to add alternate dates for when there are conflicting sources, although I think I mentioned that earlier.
I love the relationship links in F.A.G. but don`t think they go far enough. I would like to be able to go beyond parents, children and spouses and show siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc. I`d also be able to show a link to someone that is buried with a person, even if their relationship is unknown. If something like that was implemented what would be the number of relationship capped at for any particular profile? If someone came from a large enough family you might have to have 30 or 40 available links. Or would you cap it but allow people to add additional links by creating their own html links in the bio section, like you can currently do in F.A.G.? Food for thought, either way.
One observation I have about F.A.G. is that the number of categories they have listed for attached photos is ridiculously rudimentary. I would like to add several categories such as marker, individual, couple, family, document, and possibly some others. You should also be able to attach dates to documents, not just the date they are posted. As above, being able to attach circa dates or date ranges instead of specific dates would be particularly useful with images, since often one doesn`t know when a particular picture of someone was taken, although you can frequently narrow it down to a particular decade.
Some kind of visual flower attaching feature seems to be mandatory. I guess that`s a no brainer.
F.A.G. technically forbids links to other websites in their FAQs, but then says they are not responsible for content that is linked to from their site. So that`s another horseshit rule that they can just use to punish someone that`s pissing them off. Do you create a special section just for links, where the users can paste the URL and the link name, and have this site construct the hyperlink based on that? Or do you just allow them to construct their own links in a bio or a links section, in which case most people will never do it because they don`t know enough about HTML to create their own links?
Even if you explicitly allow links to other websites, do you put in verbiage telling people that they will be banned if they consistently link to inappropriate sites? Just a thought.
Going back to the beginning, this may seem silly, but I would want to have two separate title fields (even if they have the same pick list in both fields) and another separate one for military titles. You`d be amazed at how many people I have seen that had both Reverend and Doctor listed on their markers. Of course, they might have been Doctors of Divinity, but that`s beside the point. For the military markers or inscriptions, I would have a whole section with an expanded list of ranks, up to two different branches of service, and I would like the selection of the branch of service to automatically attach a little graphic of the flag or emblem of that service.
My wife inquired about the possibility of importing and exporting GEDCOM files. Are we in deep or what now?
I think that`s enough for now. I`m not going to get into the discussing how this theoretical site might be financed, that`s another digression. I can tell you what I don`t know now that I might need help with: SQL administration, programming web data entry interfaces for databases, and quite a bit of other web programming that`s currently beyond my abilities. I know you Hoi Polloi out there think I`m a programmer but I`m not. My database skills are adequate for what I`ve done so far and my website is pitiful, but those of you who are impressed that I can code HTML need to realize that what`s being discussed in this blog is taking things to a whole `nother level.
I`m not ready to allow people to directly edit this page, but if someone emails in comments I will add them to this thread, with your permission.
I thought about keeping all these ideas secret so that when I create this website and make a gazillion dollars I`ll be rich, and I won`t have to share the money with anyone but my wife. Then I woke up from my dream and realized I must have had too much pizza the night before.
Actually, I am begging someone else to steal these ideas and get this site off the ground. If anyone knows of a site like this and I haven`t found it, please let me know what it was. I will get them tons of burials to load onto their site. Sadly, I suspect that too is a pipe dream (not the tons of burials I can provide information on, but the existence of a site that will do what I am looking for). Please please please, someone else do this site so I won`t have to!
A Not So Modest Proposal - Discussion Open Thread
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Page First Posted 03/08/2013 01:23:58
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