ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s column on Find A Grave generated a bunch of responses and, as always, your “Roots & Branches” columnist learns some valuable things.

The crux of the column was that in some cases those creating Find A Grave memorials do so by ingesting online obituaries and create the memorials within hours of a person’s death even though they have no relation to the individual.

I noted that some have proposed a “cooling off” period during which only a close relation of the deceased could create a Find A Grave memorial. What I thought I was implying—but should have explicitly stated—was that it was the timing that’s the biggest part of the bother, not that no memorials should be created by non-relatives ever.

After a certain period of time—I’ve heard ideas ranging from a month to three months—anyone could create a memorial. The idea is that this way relatives do not get slammed by seeing a Find A Grave memorial online before the loved one is even in a grave.

The most interesting correspondence I received was from Steve Kleiner, who heads a project dealing with the Hollidaysburg Presbyterian Cemetery. “It started out just looking for my wife’s ancestors, then it morphed into learning more about all those buried here and what their lives were like,” Kleiner wrote. “Also of interest are the memorials themselves, the antiquity, design and so on.  All quite fascinating.”

Kleiner even has a Facebook Group dedicated to the project called “Forgotten Families of the Hollidaysburg Presbyterian Cemetery.”

“So far, along the way I’ve found or identified over 400 graves in this cemetery that were not on Find A Grave,” Kleiner wrote. “These are mostly from the very oldest portion of the cemetery.  So as the FB group name implies, they are ‘forgotten.’ They now have pages.”

Kleiner wrote that for the most part, the Find A Grave administers who already have made pages for graves in this cemetery have been great to work with. “They accept my edit suggestions most readily, probably because for each edit I try to cite a source for that change,” he wrote. “So for me Find A Grave is a great tool to help memorialize those who may be ‘forgotten,’ ”

One of the most cogent commenters on last week’s column was Pat Noble.

“I would like some distinction made between what is on the gravestone and what is the result of research or family knowledge,” she wrote. “As a genealogist and an Ancestry user, I find it frustrating to land on a Find A Grave site with full names, maiden names, etc., dates and places of birth, marriage and death, only to find the stones yield quite a bit less information. This is especially a problem when no photograph is available.”

As with any good genealogist, Noble wants sources of all this additional information.