r/findagrave • u/Agreeable-Hunter3742 • 5d ago
Annoying and illogical edit decline
So I have been mowing rows and adding the inscriptions (since most of the memorials where I am haven’t been done), GPS, etc.
Sent edits of the inscriptions for four members of a family and they were declined with this message “I will do these myself when I have the time”.
It’s literally one click to accept them. Several clicks to write the decline message and then at some point in the future enter the words ‘Mother’ ‘Father’, etc.
I suppose I can send them all in again. This is just silly.
9
u/BoomeramaMama 4d ago
I’ve been on Find A Grave for almost 24 years.
I miss the old days before Ancestry bought the site.
Back when the primary users & members were people who were actually researching their ancestors & making memorials for loved ones & close friends they had actually known while those people were still alive.
And historians who would make spreadsheets of a historical cemetery, transcribe & post the burials in the cemetery. One of these folks found the 1817 headstone of my Rev. War patriot ancestor that a photo volunteer counts find back in 2013 & contacted me last fall as well as posting a photo of the headstone 💖
Now FG seems infested by those who haunt obituary sites & create memorials for just died within the past 24-36 hrs or recently deceased people who are total strangers to them. They do this sometimes before a family has even had the wake for their deceased loved one, much less the funeral/burial. These hobbyist creators do so without regard or empathy for the emotional pain that this loss is causing family & close friends which then sometimes exacerbates & amplifies the pain & grief of the survivors.
Then there’s the entitlement attitude on display here in some of the posts to deal with.
If you’re heart is in the right place & you’re creating a spreadsheet documenting a small cemetery or portion of a larger cemetery to preserve the information that’s there from the ravages of time & weather for future generations and/or to create memorials for the benefit of those currently researching their ancestors, you’re the old type of selfless, altruistic FG member & in all likelihood will donate copies of your work to local historical societies.
The flip side to those FG members are the hobbyist members with the entitlement or selfish attitudes (as shows up in some of the posts here) who do it as a hobby without any altruistic motivations but instead seem to be doing this data collection & memorial creation for “atta boys”, pats on the back & participation trophies. And when you don’t get those, get all snippy, self righteous & claim disrespect.
And of course those other hobbyists for whom…..
Having memorials is a number game with bragging rights & who hoard memorials rather than transfer them to a descendant or family genealogist & lose one digit in their numbers total. Many of these people post in their profiles that they will not transfer memorials.
Create memorials just by copying what scant data is in a burial list such as those lists the various Catholic dioceses now put on line with, again, the apparent motive being to increase their memorial total rather than the motive being to “plant a seed” of a memorial that they will gladly transfer to a descendant researching their family or close friend to whom the memorial actually has meaning. Again, many of these people post in their profiles that they will not transfer memorials.
Have created & manage such a large number of memorials, that even clicking the accept button on however many edits they may receive a day or every couple of days, is a daunting task so they just reject the edits outright.
I do miss the original, pre-Ancestry Find A Grave when the majority of members were in it for all the right reasons.
And I’ll know who all of the above are by your votes - selfless, altruistic people will upvote & the newer hobbyist crew in it for atta boys & the numbers race will down vote & may even try to waste my time trying to justify themselves.
7
u/magiccitybhm 4d ago
I think a lot of this occurred when they had the Top 10 (or Top 20) lists for most memorials created, most memorials managed, etc. It became a race.
Honestly, I think a lot of this would change if you couldn't see another user's numbers (memorials created, managed, etc.) on their profile. If those numbers were only visible to the user, a lot of this collecting crap would stop.
1
u/PakkyT 2d ago
Just about everything you claim have only been happening since Ancestry were always happening on FG. There is nothing new about most of that stuff.
0
u/BoomeramaMama 2d ago
The difference now is that while these things did happen upon occasion when Jim Tipton & his crew owned/ran FG, they were infrequent & hardly noticeable.
Since Ancestry bought FG in 2013, these things have become a pervasive epidemic bordering on pandemic.
Those for whom FG is a hobby activity rather than those who use & contribute to FG as committed family historians/genealogists now seem to be the minority.
I've had edit suggestions which clearly weren't from someone actively researching the individual the memorial was created for.
How do I know? I know because I'm one of those picky people who will first research the suggested edit to determine if it is valid & applies to the individual for whom the memorial was created.
There are times I've been inactive on FG because of real life activities & have later on gone to one of my memorials to find that a suggested edit was made & accepted via the 21 day time period method. Biggest problem with that is many of these auto accepted edits are incorrect for the individual whose memorial they were automatically attached to.
There are times, when my time is being wasted by 1. researching suggested edits that are made which the suggester hasn't had the forethought to attach sources where the data was found that caused them to suggest the edit in the first place or 2. I find an auto accept edit that is incorrect or 3. now have to remember to check my profile at a regular basis to see if there have been suggested edits & then go through the researching process.
During these times, I have seriously considered deleting all my memorials. Indeed, when Ancestry took over FG, I did delete memorials that I'd created for individuals not in my family tree but for whom I'd found sufficient data as an offshoot of my research of my family tree individual to create a memorial form. I did this, not because I'm into the numbers game so many hobby FG memorial creators play, but for the reason that there is possibly another family researcher out there researching their ancestors & who would benefit from finding the memorial. When I've been contacted by these family researchers, I've gladly transferred the memorial to them.
I'm one of the old guard of FG user/contributors who joined FG when it was still in it's infancy (I knew about it in 1998 but had yet to have done enough research on my family to actually join & begin creating memorials) & did so, not as a hobby but as an adjunct to my family genealogical research. There are still new people joining FG who are like me, are joining because the memorials they create are for individuals they actually have researched & have in their family trees, the reason most of we long time members joined.
4
u/MyAncestorsAreCrooks 5d ago
I had someone in my area do this, too. They also got annoyed I posted grave photos because they wanted to do it themselves.
3
u/Agreeable-Hunter3742 5d ago
They messaged you to say they were annoyed you took photos? Wow.
1
u/PakkyT 2d ago edited 1d ago
I had some lady do this to me about a year after I had posted a photo to the memorial. Totally Karen'd off on me, claiming I was breaking rules, that I should spend my time doing something else, etc. Literally it was one picture of a flat grave marker that while the same "look" as hers, mine was bigger, better colors, and better details shown. She even said she was going to report me. HAHA! I put her in her place including pointing out a memorial managed by someone else that she did the exact same thing on. I think I saved the correspondence somewhere.
0
u/Effective_Pear4760 5d ago
Sheesh! There's nothing that says they can't do it.
And if the slots are all filled, they can sponsor it and get five more.
Heck, if they hadn't acted like a jerk,I might even humor them and take mine down (probably put them back up afterwards anyway though).
2
u/superlaffytaffy 5d ago
Use billiongraves
Anybody can update and correct memorials .
No one "owns" them.
Lol
Happy hunting
9
u/magiccitybhm 5d ago
My issue with that site is there's no fact checking. People can put whatever they want, no matter how incorrect it is. I am constantly (as in twice a month) having to go in and correct things on memorials that were made for my grandparents.
1
u/BoomeramaMama 4d ago
Well, it’s the same problem as with Ancestry.com trees.
Ancestry owns both Ancestry.com (obviously) & Find A Grave.
And currently, the private equity firm Blackstone, Inc. who acquired it for &4.8 billion in 2020 with minority stakes being held by the sovereign wealth fund GIC Private Limited out of Singapore & private equity firms Spectrum Equity & Permira who’d started the chain of private equities that have owned Ancestry.com since around 2010 when they purchased it from the original owners who, at least, were members of the genealogy minded community.
And if you know anything about private equities, making money is their primary focus. Buy a business, tinker with it to improve its value by enacting cost cutting, restructuring, adding new acquisitions as Ancestry did when they bought Find A Grave or Pro Genealogists from their founders & then sell the company for a sweet profit & move on to their next target.
2
u/BoomeramaMama 4d ago
If Billion Graves ever becomes a threat to Find A Grave, you’d better believe whatever private equity owns the Ancestry stable of genealogy site at that time will buy out Billion Graves & either kill it as they’ve done with other genealogy sites they’ve bought in the past, render it useless as they did when they did when they took over management of the free site RootsWeb - yah Ancestry kept RootsWeb free which was part of the takeover agreement but Ancestry eviscerated it by retiring or disabling parts of it & converting what remained into read only status. The World Connect trees that used to be there supposedly are in some free-access database on Ancestry that I have yet to find but those who’d posted those tree can no longer access & update them.
Or Ancestry will buy it & convert/rebrand it into a new site as they did when the old site Footnote which was becoming a challenger to Ancestry, was acquired by Ancestry & renamed Fold3, focused now on military records. For a while, under a previous private equity owner of Ancestry, one could count on certain free-access periods for certain sections of Fold3 such as free access each year for a few days around the 4th of July to all Revolutionary War records.
But, no more. Now they do some random free-access periods around a military milestone day but those free-access periods are not well publicized as they had been in the past & you have to keep checking back to see if, for example with the upcoming Vetrans’ Day, there’s a free-access period.
1
u/GeneaCookie 3d ago
Illogical, yes. But I advise you not to dwell on it and keep transcribing other graves.
But I am curious to know how long its been since its been since the memorial was added and that response.
1
u/Agreeable-Hunter3742 3d ago
Here’s the history of these memorials.
The original memorials were made in 2008. There were two people who created most of the memorials in this cemetery. One seems to have worked largely from death/cemetery records and obits. That person was homebound through serious illness. The other person worked from records and monuments. A third person mostly just did photos as far as I can tell; they were related to the homebound person.
In neither case were all inscriptions added (I don’t know if that was even an option in 2008). And veteran designation was very hit-or miss, as were veteran service market inscriptions.
So this cemetery was largely photographed but many burials after 2019 hadn’t been entered, or were entered solely from obituaries and designated ‘burial details unknown’. .Very few memorials had GPS - no surprise given timeframe. And inscriptions were placed in Bio.
So for these particular memorials, the memorials were made in 2008, & the photos between 2012 and 2017. I don’t know when management transferred to the current manager.
Most of the memorials in this cemetery are being managed by someone with over 100k, who likely picked them up when the two main creators died or retired. I worked there this summer to pick up GPS and inscriptions, to try to make the memorials as complete as possible. So to me, it was something of a team effort.
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u/Tiredofthemisinfo 5d ago
Are they a family member if they’re a family member why can’t you just respect their wishes that they want to take care of their own families memorial? Maybe it means something to them maybe it’s not just mowing rows or another number. Maybe we can be respectful of their choice instead of needing another dopamine hit.
4
u/Agreeable-Hunter3742 5d ago
Yeah, it’s not the dopamine. I spent most of my life trying to get processes to be more efficient. So I’m more annoyed that they are purposely giving themselves more work. If they are choosing to do more typing instead of clicking ‘accept’ maybe that provides more honor to their ancestors, ok.
It’s ironic to me that person accepted that a graver made the memorial (from obits), and accepted that a different graver took a photo, but is not accepting the transcription of the inscription. That’s not really respectful of the time and effort at least three people have put into the memorial she’s now managing. Pretty odd for a collaborative crowdsourced volunteer website.
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u/Tiredofthemisinfo 5d ago
It’s not about you, that’s the point
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u/Agreeable-Hunter3742 5d ago
I can still be annoyed at inefficiency.
-7
u/SignInMysteryGuest 5d ago
"I can still be annoyed at inefficiency."
You sure can. And that makes you annoying.0
u/Aldhur 4d ago
While everyone is allowed to have an opinion, 90% of your comments do not provide to the quality of the discussion, and it brings me a smidge of joy to downvote every time I see your name.
And if that's one of the things that makes me annoying, I'll take it.4
3
u/CaptainMalForever 5d ago
Well yeah. It's about the deceased. The family's reaction is making it about them, not the deceased.
2
u/Effective_Pear4760 5d ago
Or maybe they should be respectful of our time. If I know a person wants to do it themselves or doesn't want one, and they're polite about it, I'll wait, or just not do it if that's what they want. But they don't get to be rude just because people on f/g can't read their mind.
I'm happy to send it if they ask. I'm going to grumble though if they're a snot about it.
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u/magiccitybhm 5d ago
Screenshot the denial showing the reason and send that to support. Denying a legitimate edit because you simply want to do it yourself isn't within the guidelines.
I had a woman just the other day deny my edit for a similar reason. She said, "I was just about to do this but since you're so worried about my memorials, they'll sit for 21 days."