Obviously there are find a gravers who manage many of my family members, and that's totally fine by me. But one family member in particular is really, really special to me, and so I reached out to the person managing explaining my relationship and how I'd love to take over his page. I haven't heard back yet, and I know that some people are completely inactive from the site, but I question this particular person because I recently made suggestions, and they accepted them. So, I guess I'm just wondering if you've ran into find a gravers who aren't as generous. Has anyone ever rejected your transfer request?

Hi all, I ran into my first problem today, so reported it with my explanation. After I've done that, do I fulfill the request or unclaim it? Just wasn't completely sure.

I’m a newb to taking photos for memorials. I’ve uploaded photos for just one so far. The request list for that cemetery numbers 61, and about 20 are not in this cemetery. Should I notify the requestor?

I know I can just delete them from my list, but I had a trauma compels me to do … something. Sixty years ago my family lived in another state. My older six-year-old brother drowned and he was buried there. We moved to another state. Fast forward 40 years (20 years ago now), Mom mentioned she wanted Brother exhumed and reburied to where she lived. I said I’d get the process started and she gave me the cemetery ‘s name.

Called the cemetery. They looked him up and said, “He’s not here.” I was stunned. I called Mom and told her. Poor Mom was traumatized. Her cries of “Why would someone take him?!” and others were gut wrenching to hear.

Spent three days with dialup internet trying to find him. Ready to give up, one site came up and there he was and at that cemetery! Called the cemetery back and they went back into the old records and found him. The loser who put his information in the computer so butchered his name it was unrecognizable.

Yesterday I worked with the young men in their cemetery office. They checked their computer and went through the original cards and found two. They were great.

How do you recommend handle this kindly?

So I'm a member of find a grave for nearly 10 years and always volunteered for cemeteries. A year ago I moved to a big city in UK and started to volunteer for the cemetery nearby. Then I noticed a user who always took the photo requests I claimed and put the photos on. It happened several times that I went to the cemetery and took the picture and just when I wanted to upload it, he had done it. It really upset me because he basically wasted my time. So I wrote to him and asked him to stop this, that he could claim other requests and not fulfill the ones I claimed. I now had a message from him saying that he's taken nearly half a million photos over the past 30 years of ALL cemeteries in our city and he'd appreciate it if I'd stop accepting claims because he will do them all. Is this ok? I'm so angry with this guy, because he's so egocentric. I've lived in small towns with much smaller cemeteries and never met any volunteer who was that selfish. Should I give up? Or should I keep taking photos? I really don't know what to do.

If A uploads a photo and B transcribes it, and it was not already on the site, does it create a memorial, and if so, who gets credit for it? Sorry if this is a stupid question, I don't get involved much with the transcribing stuff.

I went to visit family at a cemetery the other day and recently I’ve been starting to take pictures of other graves just to help out and bulk upload them.

But I just thought I’d look back at “memorials I manage”, and saw that someone thought it would be funny to instead of writing the woman’s name, writing “richard nixon” not even in caps.

Are there really trolls on freaking find a grave? How often do people here misuse the site and is there a way to report the person? The rest of my photos were transcribed normally, but I guess I just thought we were all adults here respecting those before us. I still think that, but I guess now i don’t feel immune to it lol

Do you have to pay for Flowers?

Where can i find them to transcribe them! I visited my grandparents grave today to get a picture to upload, then decided to get some pictures of others to upload. Uploaded like 50 pictures, my first bulk upload, they all said “transcription ready”, but now I can’t find them? Do they get sent to other people to transcribe or can I do them myself? I especially want to get the picture on my grandparents graves profile

Hello. Does anyone know what this symbol is?

My apologies if this isn’t an appropriate ask. I’ve not done this before. I am trying to find someone that lives around the Golden Gate National Cemetery that would be willing to get me a rubbing of my grandmothers grave. I don’t know how much someone would charge for this. Anyway, if anyone has recommendations or ideas of how this can be done, I would really appreciate it. BTW, I live in Salt Lake City if anyone needs a photo or rubbing or cleaning of a grave in this area, I would be happy to help. Please accept this picture from my favorite cemetery, Mt. Olivet in SLC, as tax.

Has anyone noticed that the Find A Grave website is faster and more reliable than the actual app?

I've noticed on the app you can view open requests, but the app doesn't actually show what's already claimed without tapping into it first.

Whereas the actual website tells you what's already claimed and what's not when you're scrolling through the requests.

Also, the app seems to take it's time updating how many photos you've taken and what is posted. Whereas the website updates immediately.

You can't even view your messages on the app, but you can on the website. It would be good for these things to be implemented into the app, but until it does I think I will just keep using the website through a browser on my phone.

When you’re working on the grave of a married woman, and the middle initial on their stone begins with the same letter her maiden name begins with, see if you can find out what her middle was. A lot of the time the middle initial represents her maiden name, not her actual middle name. In rarer cases, the middle initial might represent a previous married name.

So there are a lot of cases where you’ll see, say, “Edna Q. Quinn Johnson” on a Find A Grave entry, when it should be “Edna J. Quinn Johnson.”

I ask this question because I made a photo request for two burials in another state. It was fulfilled but there was no GPS information included with the photo.

It is the first time I've seen a photo of these two gravemarkers and I am greatful for that. I was hoping to have also had GPS info so that I could find and visit these two graves using the GPS functionality of the app when I visit that state again.

What is/are everyone's thoughts on this?

I've recently been photographic large portions of some local cemeteries in large batches. Sometimes about 500 photos a week. I upload them to be transcribed, and after 7 days, they become available to the community to transcribe. The problem with this is that many transcribers are extremely haphazard.

When I transcribe photos, I always do due diligence before creating a new memorial: checking to see if there is a record under a different name than on the headstone, usually by searching the birth and death dates in the cemetery. If I do find one, I'll transcribe it under that. I've noticed that many transcribers do not do their do diligence, and create new memorials without checking first. This just led to dozens of duplicate memorials being uploaded to one of these cemeteries, which I now have to back track and correct, and I feel quite overwhelmed by it.

Is there a way that we can fix this? I feel like if people are putting in identical birth and death dates to someone already in the cemetery, Find a Grave should be able to flag it before creating a duplicate. Or maybe let me turn off outside transcription? I don't know what to do, besides staggering how I upload photos, but it is frustrating.

I’m not a frequent user of find a grave, nor am I familiar with exactly how the website works, so please excuse if this is a stupid question.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look up my paternal Grandfather on the website, and I actually found that someone had added his grave with its location etc to the website! I found this a bit strange because my Grandfather died in 2009 and no one in our family would be interested in putting this sort of thing up. Furthermore, my Grandfathers full legal name was listed on the grave posting, despite this not being the case on his actual grave stone. I decided to check my maternal Grandfather’s grave too and found the same thing, his legal name was on the grave listing despite a different name being used on his gravestone. His name was Seamus, but depending on the situation he could also go by the English translation James. Seamus is the name on his gravestone, but James is the name on find a grave. Both listings were put up by the same person, and when I looked at his profile it said he was a 25 year old man from Australia. I found it a bit strange how this gentleman was posting about grave sites all the way across the world over in Ireland, but even stranger was that he has posted over 14,000,000 other graves on his profile. I have no idea how this is even possible or how he could have gotten the real names lol.

I’d like to add here that I’m not in any way annoyed and I don’t want the listings taken down, I’m just absolutely bewildered as to how this is even possible. Is there some sort of public database I’m missing?

Thanks

Please note this isn't something I have done yet and that this is just a genuine question, as I'm not sure if it is disrespectful to the deceased.

I often go to nearby cemeteries and either:
A. Visit relatives
B. Fulfill photo requests
C. Create new graves

However, about B and C, sometimes the graves are extremely dirty, covered in lichens and moss, and some are even basically sinking into the ground... (flat markers being slowly covered by a bunch of grass)

I'm wondering if I'm able to tidy up some of these graves... for example: use tools to remove the grass that's covering the graves, pick off lichens and moss which would destroy the grave over time, or simply just spray them with a special grave-cleaning solution. I personally feel it would be a good way to make sure that people buried there won't be lost forever if grave becomes too destroyed or covered by nature, but I don't know if it's disrespectful to touch the graves. Many online sources have given me different answers and I just can't decide! What do you think?

(Reminder that this is a genuine question and something I haven't done yet!!)

View Poll

I’m getting back into genealogy and want to get involved with findagrave. There are three good sized cemeteries in town that have a majority of graves documented but don’t have plots listed or GPS locations. Is it considered bad form to go back and add GPS locations to these graves?

I see this a lot on findagrave where it says it on a user's profile page that they have passed away and links to their actual findagrave memorial, but how is this added to their user page since obviously they can't do it themselves? Does it have to be a mod or can anyone do it?

I cannot add parent memorial ID's to a person and save it, comes up as an error updating the memorial. If I dont add a parent, it updates. Any help?

Has anyone thought of writing an application to use LiDAR to scan the stones? With refinement of the recorded data that there would be no need to clean markers and do rubbings and provide more accurate and better information.

I would think that being able to read worn inscriptions might be possible when it isn’t without it.

Any thoughts?

Hello, everyone! I hope you are doing well. I recently found an old photo album and came across a picture of my grandmother's godmother, our relative. She was born in Karcag, Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok, Hungary, and later moved to the USA, settling in Florida. Unfortunately, I don't know the exact date of her passing, but I do know that she was buried in a cemetery in Connecticut, and my grandmother attended her funeral. I was young when she passed, but I have a photo of her on her 98th birthday on March 2, 1999. I was only five years old at that time, and my sister was nine. Her name is Sarah Kovács or Kovach. If anyone has any information that could help me learn more about her, I would appreciate it. Thank you so much for your attention and participation. I also posted this on the official Find A Grave forums, but I did not get a response when I initially posted it in 2021. Here is the link to the Post.

593450285_Keresztmamas98thbirthdaymarch299.jpg.2109302d9916ca43deba0385f4316a06 - Godmother's 98th Birthday on March 2nd 1999 with my sister (9) and me (5).

I am looking for someone with experience in cemetery notation.

I am looking for a certain grave cite at a local cemetery.

The notation for the plot on FindAGrave.com is: Section A, Lot 103, Rt 9

Section and Lot #s are pretty intuitive but what does the "Rt 9" mean?

Apparently the "Lots" contain more than one gravesite and some of them were purchased by a whole family and have a large surname monument and then individual headstones with just first and middle names on them.

So, I am presuming the "Rt" part means which grave site in a Lot they are in.

How would you suggest deciphering this abbreviation?

Thanks and Happy Day!

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There's a local nearby city cemtery of 20,000 I've always wanted to work on and they just added a plot map!! yay!! Now i get to make lists for each section, compare it against the FOG pages etc. Print out this new map, and in the coming weeks as it gets warmer out I can plan some day long weekend trips out to the cemtery.

I love this exciting feeling :) Plot maps are my jam, I can get a ton of photographs done (both marked and unmarked spots) if you give me a map :)

haha grammar mistake in the title, a sign of my excitement perhaps? or just not enough coffee yet today.

Today I came across a marker in my local cemetery columbarium for a man who also has a military headstone in a completely different state. His obit is thorough but doesn’t mention an interment locale, just a celebration of life at a community center. How would you go about handling this?

Just wanted to share two things that made me happy yesterday.

I keep a virtual cemetery of memorials I've made that need headstone photos (that I haven't listed the plot info and submitted a request for) and every so often I go through them to see if anyone has posted one. Yesterday I did this and found that someone had posted one for my great aunt. I was very surprised and happy because hers is one I actually had tried to find out the plot info for but when I called, I was told she wasn't there! I called around to other cemeteries in the area and they didn't have her either. Her last surviving brother insisted she was there, so I left the memorial as it was and just hoped the next time I was in Massachusetts I would be able to scour the cemetery myself. I don't know if it was a computer or employee error but I'm very happy someone took the picture and she is where we thought she was.

Her oldest brother was another missing person of sorts. Everyone insisted he was buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery so I made the memorial and later when I got around to calling for plot info, he wasn't there. I called others in the area, no luck. I even wrote the Dept of Veteran Affairs, no answer. So I changed it to "burial details unknown" and hoped I'd find him one day. Yesterday after seeing the photo for my aunt show up, I searched find a grave for his name for the first time in years and he showed up! Someone found his grave (at a completely different cemetery, in Colma) and made a memorial and added a picture for him, and very kindly transferred him to me.

Thanks to everyone out there who takes photos and makes memorials! I started looking for them eight years ago and I'm so grateful to know where they are now.

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Does Find A Grave have any protocol for inactive users?

There is one user that I have come across that has added/manages tens of thousands of memorials. It is very clear this user has put in lots of time and hard work and their bio suggests they welcome interactions. I've been slowly (over the past year) working on linking and correcting some info of ancestors few cemeteries in one county, they have all been added by said user. I also sent this user a message several months ago thanking them for all the time they have spent adding all these local memorials. All the suggested edits have gone to FG after not being accepted or declined after the 21 days.

I clicked around their page and from looking at photos and memorials added it looks like they have not added anything since 2018. Prior to that they were adding several a week for years. I have seen profiles with "fallen graver" and a few with "retired graver" on them.

Just curious

ETA: I emailed and Find a Grave says the user is “still very active” I don’t know what that is based on. Perhaps logging in data. I do think if you manage that many memorials and aren’t willing to keep them up when edits or transfers come your way then maybe you have too many. But maybe that’s why that haven’t added any new ones in years. *Shrug* who knows

I'm trying to request that my ancestors memorials be transferred to me. But when I hit the edit button and scroll around there is no option. How do I fix this?

Can anyone tell me what the current transfer guidelines are? Thank you

Has anyone had a problem with the IOS app for IPad? I have a whole lot of information on that app. I thought it was a temporary problem, but it’s been a couple of weeks now. It keeps telling me it’s an unknown server error when I try to log in.