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I’m literally in shock thinking about the fact that while complaints against the new Find A Grave website are mounting, not only is the site is getting worse, but those complaints are actually being ignored.
What gives? We all want to know. Things are getting so bad that there are actually conspiracy theories evolving out of this new Find A Grave website mess! The truth is out there…
Wherever that truth is, here’s the on-the-ground reality of my actual user experiences on the NEW Find A Grave website, 2.0:
- It is extremely ad heavy;
- It has massive scripting issues which freezes pages;
- Complaints to the admin apparently get ignored;
- Search results are unable to be processed properly
As the parent company, all of these issues are indicative of Ancestry’s slipping hold on the genealogy market. After 15 years of Find A Grave’s market growth in terms of popularity and importance in the genealogical world, Ancestry.com acquired it in 2013. In 2017 Ancestry redesigned and relaunched Find A Grave and the community was aghast!
What they launched was certainly eye-appealing; however, it has been the most bungled construction project since the architects in Pisa forgot to take ground samples and bring their levels to work that day.
The new Find A Grave site is akin to the Leaning Tower of Pisa: it’s nice to look at if you don’t mind falling out of it!
1. Find A Grave, Find-An-Adspace
Imagine walking through a cemetery cluttered with billboards everywhere you went, that’s the user experience on the new Find A Grave site. “Find A Grave?” I dare you to even try!
Any actual, usable space for memorial information is now completely overrun with nuisance-some ads. This screenshot is of a real memorial page, granted it’s not a full-blown memorial page; however, that shouldn’t matter, there should be a devoted demarcation of where any future virtual memorial information would be, kind of like a plot.
Goodness, it’s like they dug up this grave and planted a rhubarb tree in its place – kinda disrespectful.
There are 4 basic positions for ads on webpages like Find A Grave:
- (1) in the header;
- (2) in the footer;
- (3) in a sidebar; and,
- (4) in-text or in the main body of a page.
The ads themselves can be automatically generated using an ad service such as Google Ads/AdSense which is under normal conditions a great way for a site or a blog to earn money to pay for its operation. Find A Grave seems to have gone overboard with the ad placements.
In Find A Grave’s favor, their mobile site actually contains LESS intrusive ads than their website and I would venture to guess that they drive more traffic from their mobile users, which would conform to normal trends. If they don’t, that wouldn’t reflect well on their intentions.
Find A Grave maximizes all of the available ad space positions as if it were preparing for a military invasion or a zombie resurrection out of their virtual graveyard. “Not with my ancestors you don’t, bro!!!”
Just look at how many ads there are in relationship to the overall percentage of memorial space. Also consider that this image is zoomed out over 200% and that when looking at a website you are normally only looking at very narrow at bands at any given time, such as the first image.
The other issue I have with how Find A Grave is managing their ad space and how it is inundating my user experience to never go back there again is that it uses LEFT-HAND SIDEBARS. If you look closely at Find A Grave you will notice that all of the memorial information is on the right-hand side of the page and there is a space on the left-hand side of the page that contains these huge banner ads.
This was a sly technique that bloggers used to use back in the day to TRICK users into clicking more ads than they normally would because people read English from left to right, thereby placing the ad into view BEFORE the actual text that you landed on the website to read.
As someone who runs a blog and has had experience in designing and placing ads I know that this practice still exists – it is alive and well on Find A Grave. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s DECEPTIVE, but I have put it in all caps.
Left-hand sidebars aren’t nearly as pervasive as they used to be as business-conscious website owners and bloggers are now opting for sites with premium user experiences to increase the amount of time users stay on their sites and hang out. It’s all about our customers/consumers.
This is the screenshot that troubles me the most. I do think this particular collusion of ads is very misleading and should be discontinued immediately by Find A Grave. One of the features of Find A Grave (that irks me) is that any user has the option to remove ads on a page for a fee.
That is cool and entirely their prerogative; however, what is NOT cool is not being able to distinguish between Find A Grave’s “Sponsor and Remove Ads” link and the 2 other PAID AD inducements that are lurking right around it, enticing you to “CLICK TO START BLOCKING ADS” or find out more information about an “Ad Remover.”
That is not Best Practices and definitely deceptive in my book. This underscores my position even further: the amount of ads on the new Find A Grave site in conjunction with their proximity to one another creates an unclear relationship between external paid ads and internal functional links.
Being inundated by ads, of course you’re going to want to click something that promises to ‘get rid of them.’ The industry calls this “click baiting” which is basically entrapment.
2. Find A Grave Frozen Page Conspiracy
The problem with having so many ads on a bad platform is that they take time to load and are often in competition with the rest of the site’s database retrieval scripts for who gets to show up first.
It’s a carryover of the first issue of ad overload the result of which has been the Find A Grave website continually freezing up. As of 2018, no website should be frozen, “let it go, let it go…”
Those are 2 actual screenshots of what caused my machine to freeze while on Find A Grave, twice! If you analyze what the urls are, they are ad servers! They are ads trying to get loaded but battling with the site’s own scripts and code which are trying to tell them to wait but they’re saying “no! I’m first!”.
The old Find A Grave site had severely-entrenched coding issues that caused the site to crash and freeze up and it is absolutely heartbreaking to see that the new Find A Grave never took the time to bring a site that was designed in 1995 into the 21st century.
I think we should claim some kind of lemon law on this new Find A Grave monstrosity.
In all honesty, it reflects very poorly on Ancestry. If there are conspiracy theories out there, mine would be that Ancestry.com is purposefully trying to keep people OFF of Find A Grave so that they will use Ancestry more. Paltry, but it could be true – it certainly would explain a lot!
3. Grab Your Pitchforks, It’s Time To Revolt
The beauty of social media is that you never feel alone. I was very pleased to see numerous people on Facebook and Twitter who refuse to use the new Find A Grave site and are staunchly advocating a return to the old site.
Not to be anachronistic, but because the new site is like a hatchet job on our ancestors’ memorials. Just like me, I’m sure if the new Find A Grave site honored our family like the old site did, things would move forward and all would be daisies.
My favorite Twitter feed on this subject is Save Find A Grave “Classic.” They have brought forth many interesting issues and seem to be at the forefront of investigating why Ancestry has not made any improvements to the new Find A Grave given its prior inconsistencies. Those questions have apparently been ignored.
It’s been a non stop glitch fest. #suckyUx
According the @findAgrave forums the admins still use the old version. #GoodLuck
Due to the “bugginess” of the “Improved” version #BringBackClassicFindAGrave pic.twitter.com/LNWXiWCAcl— Save Find A Grave “Classic” (@SaveFindAGrave) April 3, 2018
The Twitter-verse has taken up pitchforks in revolt against the new Find A Grave, we all just want answers. Actually, forget answers, just a functional site would be nice.
The genesis of all this ire apparently is that the Find A Grave and Ancestry admins are refusing to acknowledge that a problem even exists let alone respond with any sense of alacrity or customer service. There’s a disconnect here that needs to be explained! All this reminds me of the old saying “you can’t paint a turd gold.”
4. The Results Are In . . . Wait, No They’re Not
Okay, Find A Grave is ad heavy, freezes, and its admin are non-responsive when it comes to complaints . . . what else could go wrong? Let’s start with search results not being displayed.
Say you search for a memorial and find that memorial is managed by a person who also happens to also manage a whole heap of other memorials (which is very common, and in fact the core purpose of Find A Grave!) and you want to perform a search through all of those individual user’s memorials, you can’t. ∗facepalm∗
You can’t because . . . well . . . actually, I don’t know why. It’s like going into a restaurant and asking to look at a menu but getting told: “we don’t have one.” When you follow up and ask: “well how am I supposed to order?” They reply with: “how about I just tell you what ingredients we have in the back and see if that equates to anything.”
The screenshot above is an example of this ineptitude. It literally says there are “too many results to display!” Are you kidding me, in 2018, with technology abounding exponentially you can’t process a single request for a meager 25,863 results?
Sorry Find A Grave but there is absolutely no excuse for that. There are users on Find A Grave that have memorials in the hundreds of thousands. It’s like buying a brand new car that can only turn right or missing its entire chassis.
The excruciating part is the WORDING in this dialogue box which says that you can somehow magically still search for the results that are not being displayed here. “Erm, what?!?”
If I had a second conspiracy theory it would be that the admin and programmers are filming a new version of the movie “Coffee and Cigarettes” where they are all huddled around a table laughing and chortling while writing these error messages and reading our blogs and Twitter feeds out loud.
The irony of my position in abject horror of the new Find A Grave site, I think, is shared by most of the people who have similar views, and that is that we actually LOVE what Find A Grave represents.
The pain comes in seeing something that was so beloved and important to the memory of our families get made an utter mockery of in this new redesign.
Before this post devolves into a complete diatribe against Find A Grave and I dip my poison pen into further invective ink, I’d like to end with some positive thoughts. I think the concept of Find A Grave is a testament to the power of responsible genealogy research online, and despite its numerous setbacks those are things that can be easily fixed given the proper resources.
It is my sincere hope that this site gets to where it needs to be in terms of user functionality because in reality the end game of this scenario can only be played out in two ways: (1) that Ancestry fixes Find A Grave; or, (2) someone else will. The logical outcome of that statement being that someone will come along and save the day by creating a whole NEW website that will finally serve the interests of the ‘Find A Grave’ community.
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Wonderful article and exactly on point!
Unfortunately Find A Grave disagrees…
This is a false narrative being pushed by non users of the website.
My frustration was from someone posting a page about my uncle’s death this past year…except he is not. I messaged the person responsible for the post and they took the approach of there are lots of people with that name. There may be, but I think I should know since he is linked to my Mom and my grandparents through the site. The page even mentions that he was shot in the back during a robbery and lingered 3 days before passing??!! Why would that be the only information listed ??!! No obituary or any other details about him. He is listed as being buried in an African-American cemetery that according to the cemetery’s own facebook page hadn’t had a burial in approximately 7 years. How’s that for a false narrative…
Leave a floral tribute at the memorial. Explain the situation as you have done here. I have done that a few times.
The article published IS “VERY” TRUE and hits it squarely on the nail head. Find A Grave is without a doubt most unprofessional organization I have ever dealt with and although they have rules, they apply them only when it suits them
Front page of the New Family Tree Magazine! #GenChat #AncestryHour #FindAGrave… https://t.co/nZWIrWaYET
This article is obviously biased and one sided.
1) You only show screenshots from memorials with very little data in them, which makes the ads look worse than they are on memorials with biographies and family relations. Maybe Find A Grave needs to hide some ads when less data is present. But either way the number of ads are about the same on the new site as they were on the old site. And Find A Grave has removed ads on the new site from all pages where users contribute to the site, such as adding a new memorial.
2) Find A Grave has said many times that search is currently limited because of the database the old site uses (and the new site has to use the same database until the old site is fully retired). One of the major reasons they are rewriting the website is to make it possible to use new technology to improve the search capabilities and overall site performance. They just haven’t gotten to that part yet. But search is currently no worse than it is on the old site, except that some people have trouble understanding how the location typeahead works.
3) Find A Grave hasn’t had time to rewrite the admin tools yet. So until they do the admins have to continue to use the admin tools on the old site because they don’t have anything else. It’s not because they “prefer” the old site.
4) Find A Grave has stated that they have made hundreds of changes to the site based directly on comments from thousands of people. But it’s impossible to make everyone happy, and those who are still unhappy will claim that “Find A Grave isn’t listening.” (Cue conspiracy theorists)
5) Find A Grave has acknowledged that they have problems with poor quality ads getting through. It’s a problem that any ad-revenue site with significant web traffic has to deal with.
6) You never compare the new site to the old site. You point out problems in the new site (some of them legitimate). But the new site fixes many problems from the old one. And it improves many things as well. Like adding the ability to search through your suggested edits.
The new site is far from perfect. But many people who dislike it refuse to give it an honest chance. Find A Grave is trying to make as many people as possible happy with it. But with a significant change like this it is impossible to make everyone happy. It’s time for those people to have more reasonable expectations and meet Find A Grave in the middle. The old site needed to be redone. The new site is flawed, but is moving in the right direction.
IOW IRONY!
As a retired professional Software Engineer, Software Beta Tester, Consultant to Corporations and former Website Designer, I have given this new design a more than far evaluation on a daily use. This web site design has not used or followed good practices. For Example; Using horizontal drop down boxes for geography place selection with an activation button in a far lower right corner is a perfect example of such poor layout design that is unnecessarily difficult to use.
When any new website design is introduced that increases the users time by more than 500% over the old design, it is a failure.
Keep in mind Ancestry.com is NOW owned by three foreign investment companies that have paid over 4 BILLION US DOLLARS to make a profit very quickly. They invested that amount to make a quick profit as a return on their investment. It really makes serious genealogist and faithful Find A Graver’s know that the only reason a new design was forced onto the users is to increase profits for the new owners through 900% increase in new ADS on multiple pages. Any company that introduces a new design without first asking and researching the users community what they want improved, changed or modified has another motive other than helping the user community. The new owners have disregarded and totally disrespected the user community of volunteers who built this data base of valuable information at their own expense, time and travel over 2 decades.
Dennis, That You for the truth
I am sorry but I don’t buy your excuses. Being a former banker I know the importance of being professional and over the past month, Find A Grave has been anything But Professional. Request and edits are totally ignored. My account was deleted for absolutely no reason and my memorials transferred to someone that isn’t even related to me. When I asked several times as to what the problem is, the sound of crickets. And the funny thing is that I have obeyed all Find A Grave rules and have been nothing but polite.
I have a cousin who had a horrible experience and his memorials taken over by a BlueJay who claims to be a relative but isn’t. I have a feeling my account being deleted is due to a guilt by being related if you Gey my point which is discrimination plain and simple.
Clay Kidd
I have had been a member for 13 years and over 57,000/ Got a complaint by a bottom feeder who had less than 50 memorials and wanted a transfer. A distant cousin no less. I told her the reason why, not enough activity to just transfer to you. She reported me as being mean to her and I have a few compalaints that were rude to me too. They suspended me for 30 days and I say how stupid are folks like me who fills the pockets of billionaires and use us little folks. I will never beg to them nor will I add anymore memrials, It is always the one who does NOTHING for the site that causes the most trouble. I am so closing my paid Ancestry and go to one that is much less expensive. Get them where it will hurt in the pocketbook.
Find a Grave will not continue if they retire the old version. The new one has way too many issues going on and no one wants to waste their time frozen up or buffering to get to where they want to be. Go back to the GOOD product and let the new one die peacefully….
The old site is insecure. It’s built on technologies that are inherently insecure. For that one reason alone it has to go.
The old site’s search is built on old technology that does not scale well with the amount of data the site now has. As more data is added to the site it will no longer be sustainable. Find A Grave is preempting that by updating it before that happens. Just because the old site works ok now, doesn’t mean it will continue to work ok in the future. For that one reason alone the old site needs to go.
Once the old site is gone, Find A Grave can update the search engine and the new site will perform much better.
When Find A Grave figures out how to stop poor quality ads from getting through the amount of page freezes should drop dramatically.
Just give it some time. The new site will only get better as they continue to work on it.
Let the old site die peacefully…
I have been a user of Find A Grave since they came into being and a member of Ancestry since 1997.
So you move the old format to a new updated database version, you can make it look like the old site. The way it is now, looking at the page is confusing, trying to pick out the information from the ads and I have Adblocker and some ads still show up. It is ugly, looks like someone’s first attempt at making a webpage and that they know nothing about frames and how to group things together. I know there are 10 year old kids that could make a better site than what they are building. The old site has ads, but all of the information is in a nice block and readable text. The new site it is spread all over 2-3 pages of scrolling depending on how much information on the person is posted, the number of family members connected and the photos. I have tried all three of the available color combinations and at least I got rid of most of the white writing, but it is still not as easy to read, the font is awful and too small. I have it zoomed in to where the page is filled and I am using a 17 inch laptop. Another thing is now a lot of people are putting only personal photos of a person on the front page and you have to dig to find the photo of the grave, if there is one. At least one of the photos of the grave should be on the front page, maybe they should make a separate input for the grave photo that puts it on the front page.
This is exactly like when Ancestry rebuilt their site. They pretty much told us take it or leave it, until they started losing long time paid users and all at once a lot of the old links etc came back. Find A Grave isn’t a pay site, at least not yet, so all they will lose is ad dollars if people stop using it. When new Ancestry hit, you had to take 3 or 4 steps to do what you could do in one before, most of this was changed after a mass exodus of users.
I have shown both sites to people who don’t do genealogy and they all hated the new version and chose the old version every time because it looks so much neater and there are links, not drop down menus that you have to dig through and some things are listed under a menu that doesn’t make sense.
It comes down to the fact that Ancestry is owned by a multi-national conglomerate that owns hundreds of companies of different types and specialize in none of them.
I am trying to go through and look up all of those I don’t have headstones etc for to see if they have since been posted. I want to get as much done as I can before we can’t use the old version anymore.
The other day when I clicked on go to website from Ancestry’s page with the FaG information, it took me to the wrong FaG page, I tried another person and the same thing happened.
I know they need to make money, but you can have ads without them mixing into the middle of what you are trying to look at.
The really sad thing is I have read comments from several people who have contributed for years that complained and the next day all of their work was gone, then they were blocked from the site. That was thousands of pages, after complaints some were put back, but some were not. Someone who works there is all about revenge and not service.
How long has A Person worked for Find A Grave?
As a retired Computer Science Professional Engineer and manger of data base software development, this new FAG Website is an insult and disaster to fundamental website design layout criteria for the FAG user community. The new design is still in a BETA mode of development without any dialog with FAG and Genealogist user community input. It is very apparent that Ancestry.com investors and owners have imposed on the Ancestry.com FAG management to focus upon developing income from ADS rather than serving the needs of Genealogist and FAG users whom they have ignored. Yes they have asked for feed back but totally ignore that feed back without any interest in the users needs. The new design is more complex taking much more time to accomplish the same tasks as in the previous old simpler design. Some of the new site video tutorials are not accurate. The horizontal drop down box design for places is not stable and needs to be simplified with less space in a vertical presentation. The forced insertion of “United States of America” as a suffix for geographical places in lieu of the recognized standard of “USA” is yet another example of poor coding. This requires FAG Users to perform unnecessary editing that wastes users time.
The scattered new design new design across multiple pages demonstrates a lack of fundamental Website layout GUI design by the new management team at Ancestry.com. It is an example of poor knowledge of the technologies that are inherently insecure in the new design with multiple pages of dynamic changing ADS. The new team has has developed a very annoying set of multiple pages with a multitude dynamically animated insecure ADS on the insecure Internet Explorer Browser. The Internet Explorer Browser is identified as a security risk by Microsoft. Ancestry.com has expanded from a single web page in the old design with fixed ADS on the perimeter of a single framed page design. Ancestry.com is not focused nor respectful nor considerate of what Genealogist and FAG users need or what to have available, This new design is not about serving the tens of thousands of faithful FAG users and genealogist WHO post daily inputs to add value to the FAG database.
The old design had a simple stable usable design of a framed single page website containing all information or links without ADS that were necessary for FAG users. The most insecure technology that FAG continues use is the forced launching in the out of date and Microsoft unsupported insecure Internet Explorer (IE). IE that locks up or freezes FAG pages in PC Computers with Windows 10 Operating Systems. Most PC Computers sold in the last 3 years are WIN 10. There are safe Browsers that are available that work safely for win 10 and previous Operating Systems, 8 & 7, but they are not Microsoft designs. Why does Ancestry.com continue to launch in the IE browser that creates major issues for WIN 10 PC users?
Let the NEW site die quickly and bring back the old stable design but stop launching in the unstable insecure Internet Explorer Browser immediately. …
NEW Find A Grave website:
1. Ancestry.com new management has Alienated, Frustrated and Angered faithful FAG users. The old design was simpler one single framed page with Fixed ads on top and right side
2. Recommend Creating a new design based on a Single framed main page dash board with floating movable sub frames like multiple browser sessions for the different functions as a simpler new design that has the same or better functionality of the old design.
3. Removal of high resolution Google Maps is a big mistake. “PIN ON MAP” new FAG Map system is a disaster & unusable for the GPS; Latitude and Longitude location. Genealogist require recording the GPS of a tombstone to enable visits. Uploading GPS locations into FAG is needed with a Mobil FAG APP for each FAG ID plus plot.
4. All addresses are forced to use “United States of America” in lieu of standard “USA”. Remove the “United States of America” and “United States”. Use “USA”
5. Cannot customize missing cities, townships, or parishes in places section due to historical changes in different time periods as states, counties and parishes were formed. New design is historically incorrect for places.
6. Major lack of understanding of Genealogy exists. Addresses in the new FAG only allow current 2018 geography which are NOT historically accurate. This inaccuracy greatly prevents correct research. Genealogical data and land records including Census Records for research exist in the archives of the town, county and state that existed at the time of birth, marriage, death and burial. County and state lines changed over time, Post Offices as listed in US Census Records are often the best address for Rural America. Individuals often DID NOT MOVE but County and State boundaries changed.
7. Before 1776 it was “Colonial America” not “USA”
8. It is extremely ad heavy on multiple pages on the left side interfering in the workspace that need to be removed and use this space for FAG.
9. It has massive scripting issues which freezes pages because FAG continues to launch FAG with the unsupported insecure Internet Explorer Browser; that is not compatible with Windows 10 PC Computers. This is a major BUG. Different Browser needs to be adopted that is compatible with WIN10,8,7. The Internet Explorer Browser is a known Security Risk.
10. Complaints to the admin apparently get ignored; with no respect or feedback dialog with Users
11. Search results and edits are unable to be processed properly or are lost.
12. Some fields like “Cemetery” are unstable or do not permit “Copy and Paste” functions.
13. Can NOT delete Uploaded Photos on FAG
14. Can NOT Cancel Pending Edits for corrections or errors. FAG blocks with “Edit requests pending. Some fields are disabled, waiting for approval. Pending edit requests are outlined, bold and shown in red”. Users need the ability to cancel their own pending edits.
15. No apparent online help for assistance. The FAG administrators in the past were very helpful, respectful and typically responded within a few days.
16. It appears the new FAG management sends the disrespectful narcissistic message they are interested only in increasing revenue from ADS rather than serving the FAG users and genealogist. The FAG users are who have generated this important FAG database over the last two decades as volunteers with great contributions of time, travel and money.
I have to agree with you. Ancestry did what the Coke Co. did with “New Coke” years ago–took a product that was perfectly fine as it was and re-formulated it until it sucked. There is/was a memorial made for the old Find A Grave and Ancestry removed comments left in flower section in an attempt to make people think they had done “better”. The old site was easier to use, better in appearance and more compact. I cannot believe they couldn’t keep the old format and increase security. And as for those people that poo-poo the unknown burials, many times there is bio information and the person is linked to their parents. If FAG is in fact a genealogy tool, hey, you may have found a nice little nugget of history (for free no less) about a relative!
Totally understand the ad issue, had it myself as well as site bogging down continually — until I downloaded an ad blocking software, and now it works fairly smoothly. I understand the ads supposedly keep the site free, but for me the choice was either not viewing all the ads (with ad blocker), or not using Find-A-Grave.
https://t.co/CduovAGFzM
The comments on the article are great. It sounds like one of the employees wrote up a nice script to share.
@CeCeLMoore @ShannonXmas here’s an interesting article.
The new Findagrave site is junky and messy in appearance; the Classic FAG site is clean and straightforward to use. Anything that Ancestry gets their hands on is problematic because their bottom line is complete control of all aspects of online family research. They’re the Walmart of genealogy.
New Find A Grave is Find A Grave’s death, what a disastrous mess they have made of it. NOT user friendly at all, they themselves have committed suicide with the “NEW SITE”. It is absolutely unusable now, for those who have contributed to it, it is now impossible to do what used to be done. It’s only for those few who go in and look up one or two memorials (if they have an extra hour to spare) , but no longer for anyone who would contribute on here, what a shame to totally destroy what was once such a nice site.
I agree, I can’t find anything on there anymore!
Not using Find a Grave anymore. It’s gotten way too buggy and political for my tastes and isn’t it funny that the very people who made this site possible gets credit at the very bottom of the page. As for the comment above about most of these comments being biased. I believe one has every right to complain when things are not as they should be. As one comment above so honestly coined Ancestry, “The Walmart of Genealogy research.”
New FAG is a HORROR. Cannot put in correct place of birth….keeps over riding & changing to incorrect information. Ads are constantly changing & moving. Cannot see the memorial “as a whole”. Way too many steps to create or make corrections. Ancestry has ruined an important tool for families & genealogists.
What amazes me is that nothing has been done to improve the user experience, that is the real horror. Thanks for your input!
I never liked the new Find A Grave change- it’s not user friendly at all and visually poor.
Older folks used to like the site, now it’s just plain difficult. Looking for a new site to build memorials currently.
HAD NOT BEEN ON IN WHILE, NEW SITE? ALL THE INFORMATION I HAD PLACED ON THE SITE OF MY RELITIVES HAD BEEN TAKEN OVER BY OTHER CONTRIBUTORS? SOME DELITED, AND OTHERS HAD INFORMATION CHANGED,? (GRAVE ROBBERS)
They did the same thing to me!
Exactly what they did to me. No respect for anyone, alive or passed.
Good grief! This new site is horrible! Full of ads and freezes at every turn. Yes, the old site was a bit clunky but IT WORKED!! Leave it to Ancestry to take something that at least worked and turn it into a money maker,,,for them,
I hate the new Find A Grave site too, but Find a Grave was being ruined by users even before the new site. What started as a place to post information from gravestones came to be used as a general-purpose genealogy site. People post information about family members without regard to where they are buried. Find A Grave needs to enforce a policy that you can only post information from a gravestone or cemetery/burial record. I’ve seen too many of my ancestors, whose graves I’ve visited, assigned to a cemetery in which they were never buried by a distant relative who either thought incorrectly that they were buried there or just wanted to put their information with that of relatives who WERE buried there. If you don’t know FOR SURE that someone is buried in a given cemetery, PLEASE don’t post their information in the records of that cemetery.
I have griped about this until I am blue in the face. It is a grave deposition site first and foremost with a positive benefit for genealogical research. BTW.. I absolutely detest the new format but what did people expect from Ancestry, the website that hijacks your history for a fee.
They hijack your history then they turn around charge for it! SHAME!!!
As a writer I miss tremendously the ease of research the old format provided. I miss learning how truly diverse and at the same time so similar those lives lived were and how their stories helped develop and be grafted into my characters. Facing the old screen, I’d look to the right and click on that random photo and begin learning about men, women, children, marriages, careers, hobbies, heroism and even cowardice. I’d find interesting names and connections that made gasp and wonder “why didn’t I already know this?!” There is no more ease. It’s now cumbersome and ad filled. I really hoped the outcry would have been louder but nonetheless I appreciate even this opportunity to speak. They screwed up. The End
There is a much larger issue; Unsourced and unverified information from Find-A-Grave is easily imported into Ancestry and appears as a source there. This wouldn’t be a problem if there was a quality control check on the data in FAG, but there isn’t. Entire family units can be speculatively constructed in FAG and will show up in the searches on Ancestry for easy import.
This has wreaked havoc on our trees, both on Ancestry and Family Search, as cut-and-paste genealogists have altered decades of expensive and time consuming research in the blink of an eye.
It doesn’t matter how good the user interface is if the database is full of speculative nonsense.
Amen, Amen, AMEN! All information on Find A Grave should be taken down except gravestone records (and burial records that provide information from gravestones that have been lost). Find A Grave was meant to be a site for cemetery records, not an all-purpose genealogy site. Unless there is a photograph of a gravestone, information from Find A Grave should be considered nothing more than an hypothesis to be tested. Ditto for any information that comes from an Ancestry.com page that lists “Ancestry Family Trees” as the only source.
I use an adblocker, and it had been working okay, but today the entire site is non-functional with the ad blocker on. Usually you can tweek the filters, but nope, nothing but a blank page unless it is fully unblocked. The site is unusable with the obnoxious ads. I won’t be using it without the ad blocker.
I heartily agree with the deterioration of FAG. After putting in hours and hours of work, tramping countless cemeteries, and creating 17,000+ memorials, I left FAG in disgust this past year. Memorials I had carefully crafted had been ruined by idiots posting duplicate and other “junk” photos. Evidently, their rabid quest to post as many photos as they could, with no regard to the sanctity of someone else’s memorials, was more important to them than the feelings of others. When I brought this excess of mess to the attention to an administrator as well as a FAG blog site, I was chastised for not appreciating the “help” of others! Therefore, anytime a website is more interested in quantity than quality, I’m out of there.
I totally agree! I’ve made memorials on my family only to have people duplicate them and then they have them merged so mine are no longer mine buy theirs! They do this so they can have more memorials to their names! Total disregard to the families of the loved ones! FAG let’s this continue! Heck they are the ones who merge them and without consulting the original creator of the memorial or checking facts first! Ancestry has gotten to big for their britches!
I had the same problem with FAG. On Sept 12, (the day my sister died)
I put her info on FAG. Someone posted a pic and obit, FAG took the info and transfered that info to someone else.
I checked the site and they had taken my ancestors that I had recorded for abt 15
years and transfered them to grave robbers who compete to see who can post the most! They have no respect for us or our ancestors.
I have actually been harassed and then sent very nasty and disturbing emails on my personal email account as well as the F.A.G messenger by one of their members, Bluejayln. She is a 3rd cousin twice removed. So, legally this woman is not related to me. Yet, She claims to know more about my immediate family than I do. If she request something of You and you refuse, the nastinessbegins with her. And What She Does Post on my great grandparents memorial and a great uncle (which I knew all these people personally and spent a lot of time with them) is untrue as she does not do her research. And heaven forbid you attempt to for re t her because she then attempts to turn your words around to suit her and play the victim. IT she basically lies. If the doc she finds has a Kidd connected to it and it is close to the name she is looking for, She takes it as a fact and that it is the person she is looking for. We all know professional ancestry research is not conducted in this manner. I have complained and complained to Find A Grave about this person and they have done absolutely norhing. The harassment has become so bad that I had to hire an attorney in California where she lives to threaten a law suit and I had to change my email address. This isn’t even to mention another but (Mary E.P) who claims that her grandmother lived behind my grandfather in London Kentucky. Then, She goes on the post to the photos I posted of close immediate family and copies them. Then files a complaint with Find A Grave that I stole her photos. Funny thing is that no one in my family has heard of this woman or her grandmother. And I spent a great deal of time at my grandfather’s home during my life. I know him well enough to know that IF there was a relative living behind him (he lived in the country) he certainly would have said something to the family. THIS WHOLE WEBSITE IS HORRIBLE!! I can not stress that enough. I even had a cousin go on the website and she has experienced the same treatment and from the same Bluejayln aka Roni McFadden
If someone attempts to correct information you have on your family, there are two rational responses. If you believe they are correct, you thank them and correct the information you have. If you believe they are wrong, you explain to them why you think they are wrong, providing supporting information from primary sources. Instead, we often get one of two extreme responses. Either they get upset and even harass you, which is what happened to you, or they totally ignore you and remain blissful in their ignorance, which is what usually happens to me. I could make a full-time job out of correcting errors I find on Ancestry.com and Find A Grave. Basically, if a family relationship you find online isn’t backed by primary sources (birth/death certificates, censuses, church records, wills, deeds, etc.), you should treat it as a guess or an hypothesis to be tested, not as a fact. And if there are no primary sources cited, you probably shouldn’t copy the relationship to your tree. At least Ancestry.com gives you a good way to enter/cite sources. Find A Grave doesn’t. I think Find a Grave should go back to its original intent of putting up photos of every gravestone in the world. It shouldn’t be an all-purpose genealogy site; information that isn’t from gravestones (or burial records that prove where someone was buried) shouldn’t be on the site.
I along with my mom, my aunt and a second cousin had our accounts deactivated from Find A Grave all because of two people who claimed to be relatives that weren’t, Mary E. Payne aka Mary E. P Find A Grave # 206372239 and Roni McFadden aka Bluejayln # 47037990. They were constantly posting things on our immediate family memorials that weren’t true. Each time, one of us in gthe family would politely attempt to correct them and each time, they got very nasty and just posted more and more untrue things on purpose. All of us filed several complaints with proof to Find A Grave without anything ever being done. Not one thing. And now each one of us have had our accounts closed down for what Find A Grave said was harassment without any proof (or if something was submitted by one of these two, nothing was done to make sure that they were true). No one in our family that was on Find A Grave was never been anything but nice to these two. The only time that I got a little heated was in a complaint due to Mary E. Payne stealing my photographs that I posted on Find A Grave and then she filed a complaint against me to Find A Grave and accused me of of stealing Her Photo’s. This Whole Find A Grave is VERY Unprofessional and one Can Not Go By Anything that is posted on the memorials because if this happened to us, then there are other memorials out there that have incorrect information on them.
F A G took my work of 14-15 years and put it on someone calling themselves project mgr. My family in Jefferson Co WV has been desicrated, I hope they haunt whoever these grave robbers are. When I complained they suspended my account and, Never gave me any reason why. Everyone needs check and see how many memorials F A G has stolen from them.
We need to find another way/site to memorialize our ancestors. Surely, we cannot keep lining the graverobbers pockets.
I have been sickened by FAG. They transferred my info without my knowledge. Check and see how much of your own work was transfered.
Look what they did to rootsweb. If we all leave, they’ll have to WORK and find the info we give them for free. Money, That’s their game!
What we need is a site that only posts photos of and information from gravestones and burial records, which was the original intent of Find A Grave. The biggest problem with Find A Grave is that people started using it as a general genealogy site and posted information that didn’t come from gravestones. When people put up additional family information without any documentation, they are doing nobody any favors. I find so much bad information on Find A Grave that I could make a full time job of suggesting edits/corrections.
There is such a site. It’s called BillionGraves.com.
I am in the process of trying to get all of the memorials that I have created removed from Find-A-Grave. With my most recent account, I deleted every single memorial, one at a time (around 600). These are indeed gone, and I had them delete this account. This was phase 1.
Phase 2 was to go back to my first account that I started in 2010 (which was disabled in 2014, with no notice or explanation, which prompted me to create my most recent account). While they listed me under my first account name as the creator, they were supposedly under the “stewardship” of their custodial Find-A-Grave account (#8). From 2014 to 2017, I learned that if I sponsored some of these memorials by paying these #@$% people $5 per memorial, they would transfer management from their (8) to my most resent account. I did 22 of these sponsorships.
When I sponsored my 23rd memorial for a 3rd great uncle that was in the civil war, they accepted the sponsorship, but did not transfer management to me (but they took the money).
Recently, I realized that the management of my 3rd uncle’s memorial was no longer in the “stewardship” of account #8 Find-A-Grave, and had been transferred to a 3rd party named Mander. Initially, I thought, okay, Mander must have an interest in civil war veterans because he Mander had a low total of memorials created and managed, but after checking a couple of days ago, Mander has amassed more than 32,000 memorials, while creating a mere 830 memorials.
Red flag went up. Mander is a collector, not doing any research for accuracy and completeness, just collecting. Did Find-A-Grave abandon their so-called stewardship of the memorial that I created and subsequently seized control of. Did they sell my memorial to Mander? Is Mander an employee of Find-A-Grave? Mander does not accept any messages.
I then checked tonight and learned that they did not delete the memorial for my own father (because it was under my first account that they seized – which I guess means that they can do what ever they want to do with the data). They did delete all photographs from my first account.
Earlier today, Find-A-Grave tried to invoke the familial status rule with my 3rd uncle, because he was not “immediate family” and told me that they will not delete this memorial because it now belongs to another member. I fired back that familial status has nothing to do with a memorial that I created. I created it, it is my right to have it deleted. They told me that they consider the matter “closed.”
It is peculiar how they have a four-generation rule on transfers of memorials to another member, but when you want something deleted, the field narrows to immediate family which they define as parents, spouse, siblings, children. Find-A-Grave constantly rewrites the rules so that they can “wiggle out of anything.”
I regret posting anything on this site, 10 years ago when I learned of them, I was in upstate New York in November 2010. I was excited about visiting local cemeteries and photographing gravestones of my ancestors and relatives. I trampled through leaves, one foot deep that were wet with mist in the 38 degree temperature to get threw. When I returned home, I was uploading photos, and creating memorials. A couple of days later, I received a scathing email from “Raymona” telling me that these “were her relatives too.” I realized that Raymona was a 7th cousin, but very territorial. I researched this person and found that she lived in the middle of a cornfield in western Nebraska. I had to go back nearly 300 years to ascertain how she would be related to me, yet she professed to be this expert on the Predmore family of upstate New York where I grew up. I quickly removed my duplicate memorials at the suggest of this brutal woman, but I will never forget this.
Raymona has listed my 4th great-grandfather (it is still there), in Seneca Union Cemetery. When I challenged this charlatan on this, I was disabled.
This is an example of Raymona’s work:
James “Romanzo” Predmore
BIRTH 22 Feb 1848
Seneca County, New York, USA
DEATH 30 May 1884 (aged 36)
Bath, Clinton County, Michigan, USA
BURIAL
Rose Cemetery
Bath, Clinton County, Michigan, USA
MEMORIAL ID 70844929 · View Source
MEMORIAL
PHOTOS 0
FLOWERS 1
Birth may be Hector, Schuyler County, NY.
Civil War Veteran.
Will add more when a marker is found and it is sure that this is the cemetery. His wife Delia (Kitson) Predmore was buried here.
Family Members
Spouse
Photo
Delia Kitson Predmore
1851–1884 (m. 1869)
Children
Photo
Sarah Ann Predmore Cornell
1869–1949
Flowers
Left by Raymona on 7 Jun 2011
Now how will you locate a gravemarker, when you sit in the middle of cornfield in western Nebraska? She has no intention of doing this. She just wanted the listing to add to her total of memorials.
I could understand if you wouldn’t want to create any new memorials on Find A Grave due to your unpleasant experience on the site. But to go and delete 600+ memorials that you created in the past is just pure jack-assery. It was just an immature little-you trying to get revenge, that’s all. As a result, people now and in the future won’t get to benefit from the information in those memorials you deleted, unless some of those memorials are eventually recreated by other users from their own research.
And what’s this business of disparaging someone for living “in the middle of a cornfield in western Nebraska”? Are you living in a palace and have disdain for those living in more humble abodes? So what if Raymona can’t personally locate James Predmore’s gravemarker? That’s part of the crowd-sourcing idea behind the site. Information unknown to Raymona can hopefully one day be provided by another user who has that bit of information. But of course, a hot-headed fellow like you wouldn’t understand. At the end of the day, it’s a good thing you were expelled from the Find A Grave community. Adios !
Findagrave is a free site. If Findagrave would charge a Volunteer per each memorial or image a Volunteer adds, maybe the information would become accurate.
But until this happens, the information at Findagrave is will continue to inaccurate. And why should someone pay for ancestry to only receive Findagrave information in a search? Because it will take so much longer to find that ACCURATE information, thus the longer a person pays for ancestry? Possibly? Yes.
As a serious researcher I have written Find-a-Grave totally off. It is unreliable, undependable, and one cannot use the information with any trust of accuracy. It has become nothing more than an advertising scam. It is totally useless to be incorporated into legitimate research. I wish Ancestry.com would dump it as useless garbage. And, I will not comment regarding the new Ancestry. Comic book format.
Ditto everything; I call it the popularity algorithm, the easier it is not to think critically, the more revenue it generates because DNA solves everything.
I requested a change of email address. Instead of changing my existing address to the new one, FAG set up a whole new account and suspended me saying I had two accounts. After contantly explaining the error was their’s and not mine, I finally got my account back, they had distributed at least half of my work to others they call account managers. I’m still sickened to know I had worked to find my info and that they would do this.
My account after being on Find A Grave was deleted and my two memorials given away. Over the past month I have requested transfer of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles as well as my parents twice and they were never transferred and basically ignored. And the person managing the memorials are related through my third great grandfathers brother which means, they are not DNA relations. I saw things on immediate family memorials that are not correct. When I sent in edit requests, they too were ignored.
During this whole month, I have been polite and have obeyed Find A Grave rules. When asked what was going on, I was a gay ignored.
This is a poor excuse for a genealogy site with this type of behavior.
Sincerely,
Clay Kidd
Boy if you cross those who are bottom feeders to begin with, they will suspend you in a heartbeat. No matter how much work you have done for the site for free. Another site needs to go after them
Is anyone on here willing to join together to form A Class Action Law Suit against Find A Grave for publishing photos and information on deceased family members without the written consent of the living family? Under most state laws, A grave site and sites ownership are passed down to the living relatives as each member passes. And even though most cemeteries are open to the public, they are not owned by the public but privately owned.
My email is ernest.kidd@yahoo.com if anyone is interested.
Sincerely,
Fred Kidd