Find A Grave Reviews

(based on 53 reviews)

32 of 60 people found this review helpful

I am a Find a Grave contributor. Recently, I have found three memorial pages that were falsified. What do I mean by falsified? Example: A female's obituary was published on a funeral home website. I created a Find a Grave memorial page for the deceased woman, in the cemetery where the obituary said she was interred. Then, I went to the Ancestry website to attempt to locate the deceased woman's parents on Find a Grave. I discovered that a Find a Grave contributor had already created a memorial page for the deceased woman. The memorial page stated that the deceased person's body had been cremated and that the ashes were given to a family member or a friend. The memorial page went on to state that the deceased woman's maiden name was 'Matcher.' The surname 'Matcher' came from the indexing job done by Ancestry and/or FamilySearch.org. Indexing is done when census records and marriage records are looked at (by volunteers and others). The names from the written documents are then indexed. Sometimes written documents are difficult to read and incorrect names get indexed. The incorrect names are then 'corrected' when the obituary for the person(s) in question is published. Had the Find a Grave contributor bothered to read the deceased person's obituary, the FAG contributor would have known that the maiden name was 'Hatcher,' because the maiden name was given in the obituary. The falsified Find a Grave memorial was indexed on Ancestry. However, Ancestry did not match back any official records to the falsified memorial page.

Be advised, just because Find a Grave says something, it may or may not be true. This is because some Find a Grave volunteers really must not care about facts and the truth. It is a sad thing. Find a Grave needs more volunteers who will not post something without facts.

In summary, I would recommend Find A Grave to a friend.