Long-awaited Changes Come to Find a Grave!

Many of us use the website Find a Grave on a regular basis. Some of us have created memorial pages for our ancestors; some just mine the pages created by others. For those not familiar with the site, Find a Grave is a free website that is owned by Ancestry. It is crowdsourced, meaning the data on the site is submitted by volunteers who visit cemeteries for the purpose of photographing tombstones and adding biographical information on individuals and by others who may have direct connections to the people whose pages they maintain or visit.

The problem with any crowdsourced information is it can be incorrect. People sometimes add "facts" that are based on hearsay or that have been unproven. People with little to no knowledge of the family can create a page and then abandon it, making corrections very difficult. In the case of Find a Grave, many of the pages have been created by total strangers who obtain information from tombstones that may have errors on them or obituaries or old county histories that may also be incorrect.

Although you can suggest edits on the Find a Grave website, it's often frustrating because explaining why something is wrong has been a two-step process. Making suggestions for dates and relationships was fairly straightforward, but correcting or adding to biographies or explaining why a correction is needed required a note to the page owner as well as a correction on the edit page.

This week, the Find a Grave staff announced that edits to pages will now be a lot easier. Finally, you will be able to suggest edits to every field, including biographical information, and they have added a "Notes" field, allowing you to explain why you are making a particular suggestion. You can still contact the manager of a page, if you need to, but you no longer have to take that extra step. 

The first image below is the top of the new edit page; note the "Bio information" box at the bottom of the image, which is a new addition. In the second image, which depicts the bottom of the edit page, note the new "Notes" field and the new "Contact Manager" button.

After the page manager has viewed your edits, you will get a response back that includes exactly what you suggested, what is currently on the page, and what has been approved. That additional information on the response is very helpful, especially if you made a suggestion a while back and forgot what you asked to change!

You can now designate a military veteran!

The other enhancement you will find on the site is the ability to add a small icon of a dog tag to the pages of U.S. military veterans, a very lovely addition, especially as we approach Memorial Day. Your blogger wasted no time adding that feature to her father's page, as you can see below. (The new dog tag icon is illustrated below with a red arrow; it is NOT on her dad's page that way!)

If you have never used Find a Grave, you might like to give it a try, as it can be very helpful in your research as long as you use it with caution. If you do use the website, you will surely appreciate these new changes. 

To learn more about the evolution of dog tags in the military, you might enjoy reading this recent blog post at Fold3.