Find A Grave Reviews

(based on 60 reviews)

249 of 506 people found this review helpful

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... (Read the full review)

In summary, I would not recommend Find A Grave to a friend.

236 of 450 people found this review helpful

As someone who has researched all sides of my family tree, Find A Grave is a cleverly disguised money maker for the owner filled with inaccurate information. Ads on the memorials generate revenue for the owning entity (alleged to be the cleverly disguised business entity of Mormon Church--headquartered in Lehi, Utah). Sources list the "owner" of the site as a business entity in searches to find the actual ownership.

Inaccurate information is provided by a largely proportionate group of territorial posters who have no ethical problems about stealing "memorials" from each other with zero regard for family relationships.
Too many memorials are guesses at burial information with no source documentation. It has and always will be a numbers game of who can post the most memorials until Find A Grave removes that aspect. There are literally "contributors" who sit at their computers adding memorials from the internet 24/7 who have zero interest in the people they post or how doing so affects grieving families. The ethical reality that most families would strongly object to the information copied and pasted about living relatives and their families, locations, and relationships. Additionally, many devout Catholics and other religious families would not want to... (Read the full review)

In summary, I would not recommend Find A Grave to a friend.

242 of 448 people found this review helpful

New entries on Find-A-Grave should be restricted to family members within the first 30 days of death. There are family members on Find-A-Grave who would like to manage their own memorials and not risk losing them to number-seekers who don’t care and don’t respect the deceased.

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

276 of 495 people found this review helpful

I was required to give every line a star but I have not needed tech support and there has been no exchange of money so that is a little bit of an unfair way of rating. I have been managing many of my family's Memorial Pages for some time and have been appalled at some of the complaints seen online as I have never had a complaint, a bad experience with other members or any problem at all--until I did. There is a small percentage of nasty, competitive members with ego/control issues who have turned the site into their own Personal Olympics. Some want to have the highest number of photographs, some want to have the highest number of created memorials, and some want to have the highest number of pages managed. Unfortunately, a man in the last group thinks he owns about 60 Memorial pages of my family members, refuses to edit them or transfer them to me--both violations of policy. When we agree to manage pages, we agree to transfer memorials to a family member when requested to do so. He won't edit anything at my request (this would involve actually doing something instead of just "owning" the... (Read the full review)

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

261 of 473 people found this review helpful

One of find a grave's bored house wives decided to cruise a local cemetery to see how many memorials she could compile in a week. She decided to pick on my deceased Grandmother. All the info is inaccurate. She just assumes my Grandmother was born and died in the area of this particular cemetery. WRONG!!!!! I was in the hospital room when Grandmother died. I signed the death certificate. I planned & paid for the funeral Furthermore I paid out money for the tombstone. Will "findagrave" make the corrections????? No. If I want anything changed I have to contact one of their experts. To that I say "FUDGE" bigtime.

In summary, I would not recommend Find A Grave to a friend.

265 of 481 people found this review helpful

I volunteer(ed) to fulfill photo requests, nothing more nothing less. I contacted the person maintaining a memorial for clarification as she did not post a location within the cemetery. I called the cemetery office to obtain and was told that person was not buried with them. I contacted the person again who maintained the sight and she informed me she assumed the person was buried there as closest cemetery to his death. She has yet to remove the information. She advised me she was a member of the local Genealogy society (not sure what that has to do with anything and didn’t impress me) and then she told me I had two choices: 1) contact the state for copy of the death certificate or 2) contact the funeral home. What? I volunteer to take photos. This was not research I was doing - I volunteer to fulfill photo requests. I chose option 3- I’m out. I’ve gone to the forum for assistance and been demeaned and scolded. Have they forgotten these are volunteers? I’ve seen numerous errors, info and data unsourced, wrong obits attached to wrong names,... (Read the full review)

In summary, I would not recommend Find A Grave to a friend.

266 of 514 people found this review helpful

Find-A-Grave is certainly not a fun or reliable place to be. Use this site as you would any other source, question it, but in the case of Find-A-Grave, question the validity of the information even more than other records you may find.

From it's onset, Find-A-Grave was set up to be competitive and it's fanatic contributors became very territorial.

In November 2010, I traipsed through foot deep wet leaves in the 38 degree drizzle of upstate New York to obtain photographs of my ancestors and relatives gravestones for three days in 5 cemeteries. I thought that I would be contributing to what I thought was a great project. Within two days, I was attacked by someone who is probably a 10th cousin (I had to go back over 300 years to find a common ancestor). This 10th cousin sits in the middle of a cornfield in western Nebraska and professes to know more about where my ancestors are buried than I do (the cemetery has a website listing burials). The problem is that she also made assumptions that perhaps the next older generation would also be buried there too, and listed them in... (Read the full review)

In summary, I would not recommend Find A Grave to a friend.

306 of 557 people found this review helpful

Beware Find A Grave!! I along with my mom, my aunt and a second cousin (who has a masters in Genealogy had our accounts deactivated from Find A Grave all because of two people who claimed to be relatives that weren't. They were constantly posting things on our immediate family memorials that weren't true. Each time that one of us in the family would politely attempt to correct them on something that they had posted that was incorrect they would get very nasty and just posted more and more untrue things on purpose. My Aunt Nancy never posted anything but flower Tributes on the memorials with things like, "Miss You" and the same with my mom, Alma. Yet, they too got their accounts deactivated. 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 (because there was none or if something was submitted by one of these two, nothing was done to make sure that it was true). No one in our family that was on Find... (Read the full review)

In summary, I would not recommend Find A Grave to a friend.

284 of 533 people found this review helpful

I am a relatively new user to Findagrave and initially found it very useful to find burial sites
and grave marker photos of my ancestors. After completing a couple of family histories, I started to find
information and photos contained in those family histories now appearing on Findagrave being attributed to
other Findagrave members. The information contained in my family histories was not placed on any genealogy websites, including Findagrave. It appears that some Findagrave trolls go to extraordinary lengths
to plagiarize other peoples work and to put their name it. I concur with other members complaints about
Findagrave members who are totally unrelated to ancestors taking credit for and changing other members work. Sad situation!

In summary, I would not recommend Find A Grave to a friend.

293 of 530 people found this review helpful

When Find A Grave is using actual cemeteries and headstones for information, the site is wonderful. It is a wonderful way to search and document your ancestors.

But, more and more, people are using Find a Grave as an "Ancestry" site, adding all kinds of fake genealogies and people by using the "virtual memorial" capability. The issue is that even if you have records to prove them wrong, there is no way to correct the data on the memorial unless the manager of the memorial agrees. I have run into people who accuse me of harassment of them because I want the truth on Find a Grave. I always provide copies of death records, marriage records or whatever when I ask for changes, but, still people want to express their opinions or tie themselves to someone famous, so they do not want the "truth".

I have been a member for years, and I hate to see the site being mis-used in this manner. I also feel sorry for people who are new to genealogy and are misled by these kinds of issues.

In summary, I would not recommend Find A Grave to a friend.