5 Tips to Use Find-A-Grave Like a Pro Genealogist

Find-A-Grave has become a very important tool for genealogists, especially since Ancestry has employed them as an official source. The Find-A-Grave community is full of robust, caring individuals who have taken the time and energy to honor their ancestors by creating memorial pages that are available for public genealogical research.

Since joining Find-A-Grave in 2012 I’ve discovered a few things about the site that you should consider when researching your own genealogy. Find-A-Grave is amazing, but not flawless. The image snippets are from the old site but the techniques still apply.

Here are my 5 Tips to Use Find-A-Grave Like a Pro Genealogist

1. Ghosts in the Find-A-Grave Machine

Just because you can’t find a memorial doesn’t mean it isn’t there! The fact is, Find-A-Grave’s search engine kinda sucks. I usually just use Google to search for memorials on Find-A-Grave, it’s much easier and quicker than all the kooky fields and old-school drop down menus on there. What a blasted headache.

I had been searching for 3rd great-grandfather on Find-A-Grave who was born in Tennessee and had served in the Civil War but could not find a memorial for him or his wife. I naturally concluded that no memorial existed; I even searched on Ancestry and Family Search to no avail. Then, boom! There it was on Google.

The fact is that the LESS duplicate memorials there are on Find-A-Grave, the MORE efficiently the site will run. So make sure you check thoroughly before jumping to conclusions. I found another Find-A-Grave memorial that I thought didn’t exist that came up in my Ancestry search results for a completely different person!

2. Source Sorcery

I’m always harping on doing factual, scientific genealogical research. Paramount to that is making sure your SOURCES are correct before accepting them. This tip is for Ancestry researchers who get hints and other hits in their search results for a person with Find-A-Grave as the source. First of all, I love the fact that Ancestry recognizes Find-A-Grave as an official source, that’s cool! However, it’s all too easy, and all too lazy, to just hit that “save” button and off you go.

Any trained and responsible researcher will always visit the memorial page you are about to accept into your tree and verify that the information is correct and that you actually have the right person. I’ve seen all kinds of hodge-podge adds on public Ancestry family trees. Free Willy-Nilly!

Here’s the danger, and it’s systemic. When you accept a piece of information as fact, it gets accepted into Ancestry’s database algorithms and will appear in other relevant search results for other people. This creates a multiplier effect of bad information as incongruously related facts. Basically, you are doing a disservice to others by passing on incorrect information. It’s like the Borg from Star Trek or the Black Plague in the Middle Ages but in bits and bytes instead of mites and lice. It’s also like lies and gossip spread about a person, so check your facts before your accept your facts!

Here’s an example of a Find-A-Grave contributor pointing out incongruous facts on a memorial page. That’s the beauty of Find-A-Grave though, people work together and help each other to correct these things. It’s about our ancestors after all.

3. If You Want the Job Done Right…

My family always said: “if you want the job done right, sometimes you gotta do it yourself.” I’m sure y’all have heard this too! This saying definitely holds true with Find-A-Grave. If there are no links to an ancestor that you would like to honor and have available for other researchers to utilize, then you can create your own memorial. It’s super easy and besides, it makes you feel good. Only add a new memorial after exhaustively verifying that no duplicate memorial already exists.

Step 1. Create an account. Step 2. Use the static menu on the left-side of Find-A-Grave to Add Burial Records.

Step 3. Use the Family and Friends link to add all of your ancestor’s biographical information. That’s it! Go back, re-edit the page and make sure it looks nice. Make your family proud!

4. Find-A-Grave Grave Swappers

You will find that there are BIG and SMALL contributors on Find-A-Grave. The small contributors are like me: I manage 17 memorials and have created 11. The big contributors (see the Top Contributors link on Find-A-Grave) are basically there to do a public service, they go out and catalogue as many graves and create as many memorials as they can because that’s their passion. Most of the memorials they create are not kin to them. Many of whom I’ve seen take an interest in a certain cemetery and aim to catalogue the whole thing. Find-A-Grave’s top contributors have over 3 million memorials! Other big contributors have upwards of 500,000!

Thankfully, these super awesome people are also very respectful of descendants of a person who would like to directly manage their own family’s memorial page. At Find-A-Grave this is called a MEMORIAL TRANSFER, where one user transfers ownership and management of a memorial page to another. No need to duplicate, just cooperate!

Many of these blessed individuals put up transfer policies so (1) make sure you ask and engage politely; and (2) use the Find-A-Grave transfer request.

5. Think Before You Link

What makes Find-A-Grave such a great research tool is that you can link memorial pages together. This creates a web of information that sites like Ancestry aggregate and pass on to their consumers as sources or facts. One of the things you want to do when creating a memorial page is to link that person to other family such as parents, a spouse, and children. This is where Find-A-Grave sucks you in! Once you create one page the tasks become exponential – welcome to genealogy 🙂

Again, think before you add any information as fact or link to another memorial page. Editing family relationships can be done right from the memorial page by using the “Family Links” edit option. You can enter the Find-A-Grave memorial numbers directly into the fields there and they will automatically link out to the appropriate Find-A-Grave page. You can find the memorial number at the very bottom of any memorial page.

Find-A-Grave is a study in contrasts to me. It is at the same time a website for the deceased yet so full of life! It’s not the most user-friendly yet is so rewarding to use! It’s like that face that “only a mother would love,” except in this case its the site only a genealogist would love! That’s my 5 Tips to Use Find-A-Grave Like a Pro Genealogist, now go out and research.