SOCIAL MEDIA SITE FOR THE DEAD

The photos I take end up on a website called FindaGrave.com, a repository of cemeteries around the world. Created in 1995 by a Salt Lake City resident named Jim Tipton, the website began as a place to catalog his hobby of visiting and documenting celebrity graves. In the late 1990s, Tipton began to allow other users to contribute their own photos and memorials for famous people as well. In 2010, Find a Grave finally allowed non-celebrities to be included. Since then, volunteers—also known as "gravers"—have stalwartly photographed and recorded tombstones, mausoleums, crosses, statues, and all other manner of graves for posterity.

Think of it like a social media site, but for the dead. People can use it to "visit" the graves of their loved ones—in some cases, maybe even for the first time. But it's not just for mourning or nostalgia: The revelations held in cataloged graves have proven vital for everyone ranging from historians to journalists to your aunt who is really into your extended family's history. And there is a lot of information. More than a million contributors add thousands of new memorials and photos by the hour.

This graving free-for-all has caused some controversy over the years. Find a Grave—now owned by Ancestry.com, with a commercial interest in its operation—has a moderation team that works to ensure the new graves are real, the bios are correct, and people's requests get doled out appropriately. But this team is a decentralized crew of volunteers, many of whom are older folks doing this in their spare time.

Jenn O'Donnell first got involved with Find a Grave 16 years ago, after she learned her father-in-law was orphaned as a child and decided to track down the identity of his parents. "I just Googled an ancestor's name and their Find a Grave Page popped up," O'Donnell told me.

What began as a useful tool to help with her genealogy project morphed into a hobby and then a passion. It's a story that's familiar to so many other gravers on the website. While we stumble upon Find a Grave for different reasons, we end up finding out there's more to it than just pictures. It's also a community of researchers and archivists who are dedicated to the singular goal of memorializing and preserving the memory of as many people as possible.

Before Find a Grave, it could be difficult for loved ones of the deceased to find information about cemeteries and burial sites. Often, it'd require getting ahold of city records, speaking to people at local genealogical and historical societies, and interviewing your family members or anyone who might have known the dead person you're looking for and be able to point you to where they are buried.

Now, all of that detective work can fall to anyone with spare time. "I think many just sort of get the bug," O'Donnell said. "They're interested in uncovering everything they can."

Anyone can submit a request to have any gravestone photographed and recorded on Find a Grave. Most requests come in from far away. For example, if you found out you have a great-great-grandparent buried in the middle of the Texas brushland but you live in Connecticut, you could ask a graver who lives in Laredo to swing by and take a photo for you.

Al Wilson, a Pennsylvania-based graver and local historian in his city, is interested in the documentation aspect of Find a Grave. Over the 16 years that he's been on the website, he's uploaded more than 14,000 pictures, with 4,700 being new memorials of people who have never been documented. "These are connections that I'm very proud of," Wilson told me. Without him, they might have simply been lost to time.

To read the complete article, see:
My Weekends With the Dead (https://slate.com/technology/2024/10/afind-a-grave-ancestry-family-grandfather-controversy.html)

 

To read the earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
BOOK REVIEW: THE PRIVATE SKETCHBOOK OF GEORGE T. MORGAN (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v16n02a08.html)
CHRISTIAN GOBRECHT HEADSTONE DEDICATION (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n47a07.html)

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