Written By Ken Beecroft
I will point out right from the start that I have no official capacity with the Find A Grave organization, and I am strictly a volunteer contributor to its database and do not intend this article to be an endorsement for this product. That being said, as a local historian within Middlesex County, and a member of The Glencoe & District Historical Society (G & DHS), I found this online tool about eight years ago, and quickly determined that it was very useful toward digitally documenting the stories of local families. More than that, it not only details local cemetery burials, it expands to allow a greater understanding of how that past individual came to be, along with their stories, from their ancestral heritage, and in some cases, how their families grew and developed.
Being involved in history, and having access to many sources of factual information, gives me—and I might add, many collegues locally and around the world—an opportunity to add to the story and knowledge of the existing memorials, and to develop new ones. Working, collaborating and getting to know other likeminded researchers, is a rewarding benefit of improving and enhancing the Find A Grave experience.
Find A Grave is a reliable and proven source on the internet to readily look for burials and other final disposition information for your family, friends and famous people. The site provides tools that let people from all over the world work together, share information and contribute to a meaningful and significant online project. It provides far more than the mere tombstone basics; “name–born–died”. All this, of course, is dependent upon the volunteers and their collective knowledge. It should be mentioned that it is only one tool, and should be used in balance with other online sites available. In researching family histories, no one source will provide all of the answers.
At Find A Grave, members, users and browsers will readily find details about cemeteries and individual memorials for many of the people buried there. Memorials generally include birth, death and burial information and may include digital copies of official documents, photographs, maps, paintings, scanned history references, biographies, obituaries, family information and more. This is the information which tells the story. Members can contribute what they know and they can even leave special tributes and remembrances through ‘virtual flowers’ on the memorials they visit. This can be easily accomplished for close family members, ancestors from further back in time, or for famous people from the past that we may cherish and be interested in. Most famous people from the past have been memorialized. It’s easy to look them up.
Find A Grave’s origins are surprisingly humble, rooted in the early days of the internet, with a flatbed scanner, and the idea that people could work together all over the world, connecting and helping each other. Since the beginning, there has been an ongoing evolution within the member community since Find A Grave was created. So, for over thirty years there has been continued growth and updates provided by the folks at Find A Grave.
A closer look at the beginnings from their own background information will provide a better understanding that, Find A Grave got its start in 1995 when founder Jim Tipton built a website to share his hobby of visiting the graves of famous people. He found that many people shared his interest and quickly opened the site for all individuals (famous and non-famous) with a mission for finding, recording and presenting burial and final disposition information worldwide.
As the site grew, the community grew as well. Find A Grave houses the largest international graving community in the world. In 2013, Find A Grave became a wholly owned subsidiary of Ancestry® and launched a new iOS Mobile App. The Android app was released in 2014. Ancestry redesigned the website and released it in August 2018, making it more user friendly and available for the contributor in the field to download a memorial along with photos and Global Positioning System (GPS) co-ordinates, while standing beside a gravesite. Future researchers will be appreciative of this effort after the stone or marker has vanished, or become illegible.
The community continues to add and update memorials every day. Find A Grave contributors from many countries around the world have identified an incredible 628,000 cemeteries, both active and abandoned, ranging from a single burial, to cemeteries with hundreds of thousands of burials. Although the number keeps increasing, the population is over three hundred million memorials worldwide. This staggering number continually grows by about 250 memorials, added by volunteer contributors every hour of every day.
Our philosophy at G&DHS reminds us that “Local history is more than what happened long ago. It’s the stories we remember, the places we care about, and the people who shaped our communities”. These are the attributes that add to the content and character of Find A Grave. Although I, probably like you, am unsure and skeptical of what AI might bring, I will look forward to an exciting future for the site and the community of involved contributors and users.
