Fact & fiction
The most (seemingly) non-sensical (but important) blog post you’ll want to read.
As people who do genealogy, one of the fundamentals when conducting research is not to take everything at face value. When I’ve got stuck on something, I’ll look at another member’s tree on a website, to try and give me another avenue to pursue and research myself. When I started, I took a lot at face value and did a lot of click, click, clicking and not much checking. I can remember one time I went on a FindaGrave adding spree where once I came out of it, relations were appearing on my tree like the ‘wife of the uncle of the niece of my 7th cousin 12x removed’.
Safe to say, that would come back to bite me later, but it taught me a lesson and prompted me to chop off that branch (that spree was entirely unnecessary) and to be more cautious and thorough in what I do. Especially with the technology we have available to us with genealogy sites giving us little hints along the way, we tend to trust that whatever is on it is always coming from a trusted source. Or, so we think.
Chatting on a Discord server a few nights ago set me off on the most unusual (while simultaneously interesting) rabbit hole. A member posted about stumbling across some unusual-looking Find a Grave memorials. This was the one that was shared with us.
Now, it looks like a normal memorial on Find a Grave that you could stumble across. But digging a little deeper, all was not as it seemed. They put the photo through a reverse image search tool to find that this was not Margaret Salsbury Whim but Eleanor Elizabeth Stephen, the eldest daughter of Sir Alfred Stephen, third Chief Justice of New South Wales.
Looking at the family who were listed for Margaret, there was something very strange. All of Margaret’s kids and her husband, for people who died in the ‘60s, ‘80s and ‘90s, had very recent photos on their memorials. Almost as if they didn’t match either. A reverse image search on the photos of her children showed that they were all photos of other people.
They were all created by one user. A quick look at their profile showed that they only started adding memorials back in September last year. They had added just under 250 memorials, but the question lingered. Were there more fake / falsely attributed images / memorials? So, with the help of Macy, Hunter and Elaine from the Treehouse Genealogy server on Discord, we got to work.
We listed all 246 memorials made by this user in a document and put all the ones which had an image attached to them through a reverse image search. Apart from one or two photos, practically every other image was INCORRECT / FALSELY ATTRIBUTED. This individual uploaded photos from stock images but also uploaded photos of people from random obituaries who had no relationship to the deceased. As for memorials, I had checked 10, it’d take a lot more to confirm the others, but they were fake.
One alarming part of this research is this volunteer decided to take photos from three users [the first, third and fourth in the below] on LinkedIn who are very much still alive and post them as the portraits of these decedents.
Below is what the entirety of our research yielded. Below are the sources of photos (if present) on this user’s memorials that were added. Only one was correctly attributed.
You’re probably thinking that this hasn’t done any harm / isn’t that misleading if these people don’t exist, right? Except, it has been misleading as one person has even gone as far as to request an image of the graves belonging to one of these non-existent people. Safe to say, you’ll be waiting for a while.
One memorial created was a non-existent son of Charles Francis Adams Jr. - a Brigadier General in the American Civil War. The non-existent son was named Charles Quincy Adams, except there was no son named that, according to Adams Jr’s WikiTree page. Even more, the photo of ‘Charles Quincy’ is actually Charles Francis, and is already on his Find a Grave page.
Additionally, this person even went as far as to create a memorial for someone who died in the 9/11 attacks in 2001, a noble thing to do — if the person existed. I checked the 9/11 Memorial’s website & a list of FDNY personnel who died. [I wish I was making this up]
Naturally, the next step would be to report the offending memorials, but on the Find a Grave site itself, you can only report the memorial on the page itself if it’s a duplicate, there is no button on the page that you can click on to report an actual memorial or any image that goes up. So, when you go to the Help page [at the bottom of the website] it’s one of the main FAQs.
If you’re trying to remove a photo and if you eventually find the Copyright Notice, you may think that it’ll almost be solved, until you see the long list of things you need just to take a photo down which only the copyright holder of the photo can do.
However, if you are trying to get a memorial taken down, the only saving grace is it’s not as much of a drawn-out process as the whole photo removal process. But honestly, I think even having a button on the memorial page to even say ‘Report Memorial / Photo’ would be an improvement, as minor as that may seem.
After researching this, it’s now made me think about reverse image searching all photos of people on memorials I come across just in case there are more of these situations. It might prompt you to do the same, as stuff that is put up on sites like Find a Grave may not always (but most of the time it should) be accurate. It only takes 30 seconds to check and is worth it.
For people wondering what tools we used to check these images, we used Tineye and Google Images.
Still staying on the Find a Grave angle, is how it shows up in my own mother and baby homes work. Three and a half years since the Commission of Investigation published its final report, we are still asking for investigations into the grounds of these institutions.
It’s sad to see that there are ‘graveyards’ on Find a Grave for Bessborough, Tuam and Sean Ross Abbey - yet we do not know who is / isn’t buried where. For Bessborough, all except one are plaques, a memory to those once lost, until we get some form of investigation done. We do not know precisely where they rest.
So, Find a Grave — every time I have spoken to you, you repeatedly said to me that you like hearing all opinions, so if you’re unwilling to police the hunt for newly deceased people by the volunteers who turn this whole activity into a game who care more about the stats than the families, I do hope that you’ll take swift action with the fake attributions / memorials on your website.
I’ve got the proof if you’re interested. Your choice.
An update: Once again, thank you to member, Alec for sharing & talking about this.
This morning at 6am my time, I got a message from a representative at Find a Grave, that the memorials along with the account who created them have now been removed. Credit where it’s due, thank you to Find a Grave for their swift action & thank you to all who read, shared and raised the alarm.
This post shall remain live as just because only one occurrence of this has been found so far does not mean that there isn’t more out there / can’t happen again.
 |
|
Apparently they've already addressed these bogus memorials. I've always found Find-A-Grave site Support responsive. I know a lot of people like to get in digs at the site, but they're managing a user created site of over 238 million memorials. It is disturbing some nut is out there creating fake memorials. Thanks for raising the flag and getting it addressed.
Great research on a phenomenon I’ve been seeing all across online genealogy for several years. The number of errors and volume of misinformation have skyrocketed! As someone who has been involved in family history research for decades, I understand there’s a learning curve involved and mistakes happen, but so much of what I’m coming across just defies common sense! It’s like folks are more interested in “finishing” than getting things right. Anyway, thanks for bringing attention to the Find a Grave issue - and the reminder that the rule of genealogy (and I dare say life) should always be quality over quantity.