ROOTS & BRANCHES

Dale J.J. Leppard didn’t just fall off the turnip truck yesterday.

But some managers of Find A Grave memorials treat him like he did.

Find A Grave, owned by Ancestry.com, is a free online service that aims to document headstones worldwide and is uses volunteers who provide tombstone photos, biographies, and other information about burials.

Leppard’s main beef is with Find A Grave’s administrative structure. “Specifically, managers have nearly omnipotent control over individual content, and no one seems to know what to do about it,” he wrote.

Let me start with a disclaimer: Many Find A Grave volunteers are wonderful people who add much data that wouldn’t otherwise be available to genealogists.

But some are more “harvesters” than good-hearted volunteers. I ran into this some years ago when such a volunteer harvested an early version of a high school classmate’s obituary for Find A Grave memorial and made no effort to change it when a far more complete obituary was available.

But on to Leppard’s situations.

“A few years ago I discovered the entry for the grave of my 2nd great-grandfather in Newark, New Jersey, was horribly garbled. His first name was the feminine form in Italian and his birth date was 20 years off,” Leppard related.

He contacted the memorial’s manager and provided information for his exact birth, baptism, death, and marriage as well as his wife’s information, including sources.

The manager tersely “rejected” Leppard’s suggested changes because the information conflicted with the manager’s source, which he did not share.  

Leppard and the manager had a few go rounds until the manager admitted he guessed Leppard was correct—but that the manager hadn’t saved any of the voluminous documentation Leppard had sent and that it would have to be resent.

More recently, Leppard found an Ancestry.com link to a third-great-uncle who followed the baptismal customer of the time by being baptized as “Johann Jacob” and then using simply “Jacob” in later records, including his burial in Cumberland County.

Leppard had loads of familiarity with the cemetery and church records in question, so when he found the relative’s name on Find A Grave as “Jacob Heinrich” (Leppard says it appeared that someone had incorrectly merged an entry from a different cemetery to create a “Frankenstein” ancestral name) he requested that the name be changed.

 “When I initially contacted the manager, I also cited numerous sources including the tombstone itself, all of which rendered the name as just Jacob except the baptism which was Johann Jacob, and offered to send image copies if she would provide an email or a method to send them,” Leppard wrote, including some of his credentials as having served as an officer in various genealogical societies and lineage organizations. He again faced rejection, however.

I think Leppard thought I might have a silver bullet but, alas, I do not. It’s a cautionary tale to remember that all Find A Grave information is not correct!