Slow and steady…
On May 24th, I announced that I’d be reducing my Twitter usage in preparation for the state exams I’m having to face in June. Two days later on May 26th after hearing from my genealogy friends across the pond about the events in Uvalde, that evening — a sinking feeling struck me and made me think about whether or not they had been added to Find a Grave. So I looked up Find a Grave’s database and was stunned to see that every victim had been added to Find a Grave within 48 hours of the tragedy.
At the time, I felt very uncomfortable seeing that all of them had been added already — and they hadn’t even been buried yet. Realising that the social media break was going to be short-lived, I gave in and took to Twitter and posted this:
Within minutes, many people responded expressing their anger at this. You might be wondering, why did I feel uncomfortable. Let’s just say without going into specifics, is that I’m not unwilling to share something when it doesn’t sit right with me. This was one of those occasions. People were tagging Find a Grave and/or Ancestry and wanted a response from them regarding this.
So within about two hours of posting that tweet, Find a Grave did reach out and a video call was arranged for the following day. I met with them and the following morning, I checked my emails and got one from Find a Grave with a statement that I was encouraged to share with the genealogy community. This is what I was sent, however, if you were one of the people that reached out to them — you may have gotten this statement as well.
Our hearts go out to the grieving families and community of Uvalde. In the face of this senseless tragedy, we are especially sensitive to the role our platform — and our community — plays in memorializing and honoring those who have passed.
Our Find a Grave community has created more than 200 million memorial pages and each comes from a place of caring and the desire to be of service at a time of deep sorrow.
We are committed to listening to our users and proactively engaging the community to continuously improve our experience. We did that recently and updated our site to limit the information shown on a recently deceased memorial for three months. We are working to extend this same experience to our mobile app.
As a community-driven site, Find a Grave will continue to strive to balance the diverse perspectives of our users.
As I’m sure many others thought, I didn’t feel this addressed the concern at hand. As I write, there’s definitely discussion about how a waiting period would work and in my opinion — I feel this would be the sufficient path to pursue. I’m unsure as to how long this period should be but suggestions range from 30 to 60 to 90 days. In the above statement, I didn’t agree with the part that read: “…each comes from a place of caring…” and I’ll tell you why.
Many months ago, I was helping a friend of mine with her family history. For this sake, we’ll call her Mary. We were trying to flesh out her tree and addressed hints that were of the immediate family. There was one hint for Mary’s aunt Anne [not actual name] and took a look at it. Mary wanted to take control of Anne’s memorial as she had no descendants. Mary inspected the memorial closer and saw that the full obituary had been lifted and added in and Mary was mentioned in it. This made her feel uncomfortable and asked the memorial manager to transfer it to her. However, Mary never received ownership of Anne’s memorial. So I recommended that Mary goes straight to Find a Grave support themselves. We never heard anything back. Now while this was added a number of months after the death, it was still frustrating that this wasn’t transferred.
I’ll tell you one more example. Another friend of mine, we’ll call him Mark. I was doing research for him and was showing him his tree. I would eventually find his parents there. His mother had been added 2 days after her death and his father was added two weeks after the death. I was more annoyed at how immediate the creation of these memorials was.
Now, I’ll say this now — I am not annoyed with the absolutely amazing volunteers who put a great deal of their time into curating Find a Grave and transferring to others who request. I feel like in all of this, they might be forgotten sometimes, so please know that I appreciate you. I am annoyed however at the people who create a memorial as soon as the obituary is released even before the individual is buried. I tweeted a couple of days ago:
“It isn’t Find an Obituary.
It isn’t Find-a-photo-of-someone-who-died-with-the-obituary-attached either.
But above all else, it’s most certainly not a race to create a memorial within a record time of the person’s death.”
I don’t understand the desire to create the memorials as soon as the death is announced. The family might want to create the memorial themselves. If they see the decedent has been added already, they’re being robbed of that. The LAST thing a family should have to think about while grieving is making sure that they add their family member to Find a Grave.
This is my formal request to you Ancestry, to read posts on Twitter, blog posts, comments on Facebook and feedback and see how much discord, and negativity and discomfort this whole thing has caused — please do the ethical thing and do something. It’s time something changed.