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REALITY/EXPERIENCES of Find A Grave:
1. Filled with memorials that are regurgitated information from online obituaries without credit to the source of the information (plagiarism) most of the time containing private information of living relatives/survivors without their permission.
2. There is a great deal of false/incorrect and embellished information with no source documentation. It is NOT a reliable genealogy source.
3. Encounters of "contributors" -volunteers who post obituaries, take photos, etc. who are territorial, rude, engage in harassment, refuse to transfer, report others for no reason to get accounts closed, circumvent the rules, etc. are more common than not on the site. Find A Grave is a territorial hoarder playground of who can amass the most memorials with no regard to the affect it has on family members. Deceased family members are immediately posted to Find A Grave by strangers hoarding memorials adding to the pain of grieving family members. The grief is exacerbated by hoarding contributors seeking memorial numbers.
4.The site makes money from the advertising of which families have no control over (unless you want to pay to remove the ads); which generates more money for the site. It successfully employs FREE LABOR to make it money every time a "volunteer" hoards another memorial.
5. There is really no administrative oversight; rules/guidelines are contradictory and subjective inclusive of some members allowed to repeatedly break the guidelines while others are repeatedly reported by others and subjected to Find A Grave warning letters and threats of closing the account. There is no recourse/arbitration. The Support Volunteer can demand you to delete memorials for whatever reason or face account termination and will allow another contributor to be creating the same memorials without recourse (even when made aware of the double standard). Contradictory rule: Duplicates are not allowed.
BUT the first memorial in the correct cemetery will be kept. How can the first memorial in the correct cemetery be kept if a duplicate memorial in the correct cemetery cannot be made?? {{ Don't expect an answer to this question-Find A Grave won't give you one. I tried. }}
ILLUSIONS--FANTASY--FAR FROM THE TRUTH:
1. Find A Grave is a great resource tool for genealogists.
--Find A Grave clearly states that it is a GRAVE site, not a genealogical site, however, that stance is changing direction given the ownership of Find A Grave by Ancestry.com. The owner (hidden in a business name but alleged to be the Mormon Church with headquarters in Lehi, UT) appears to be attempting to merge them together to promote them as a genealogy source and not just a Grave source as originally created.
--Take the information found on Find A Grave with a grain of salt. MOST memorials are copied and pasted by contributors only interested in the number of memorials they can post/hoard; and have no investment in any accurate material contained therein.
2. Find a Grave memorials are plagiarized (copied and pasted information from another source with no credit given), give out private and personal information for living relatives without their permission increasing chances of identity theft. (I realize the information may already be public via the obituary; however, copying and pasting it to Find A Grave facilitates the spreading of private information without permission.)
3. Find A Grave is a "collaborative" effort by all contributors.
---The negative and downright awful encounters with contributors and Find A Grave "administrators" (volunteers) far outweights the positive interactions between contributors and families. The internet is filled with negative comments about the website and what goes on among contributors and others due to family transfer refusals, hoarding and stealing of family memorials, etc.
** Find a Grave could solve ALL these issues by simply making all the memorials the property of Find A Grave (removing all "Creator/Manager" properties and allowing for editing by others only. This would end the hoarding and the family transfer issues. * This will likely never happen because Find A Grave cares about revenue generated by the free posting of memorials by contributors, and not about the terrible experiences of their website. **
There are no good points about Find A Grave for contributors or families. The "good" aspect of the website is the revenue it generates through ads and families paying to remove ads from memorials posted for their deceased loved ones.
The REALITY/EXPERIENCES of Find A Grave substantially outweigh anything positive or resourceful about it. Unless or until Find A Grave ownership take the steps to remove the numbers and hoarding game with the removal of "Creators" and "Managers" from the website and just allow the posting of memorials by contributors who wish to do so--Zero ownership--requiring no interaction between contributors and families--the site should be CLOSED.
In summary, I would not recommend Find A Grave to a friend.
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