Find a Grave and Cousin Bait

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Collaboration and Cousin Bait

Do you use Find a Grave in your genealogy research? I do, all the time! Right along with Ancestry, Google, Wikitree and FamilySearch. It shares with the most useful sites the power of collaboration and "cousin bait," which is advertising your name and contact information on profiles of relatives you share with your cousins, some of whom are researchers looking for you. 

If you use Find a Grave only to find out the name of the cemetery in which your relative or ancestor is buried, you are missing out on much of the power of the site. And I'm not just talking about the clues such as date and place of birth, death, names of parents, spouse(s) and children. Before moving on think about who the  someone is who added information to the memorial. If it is not you, you can add information! And you can click over to their profile to find out which cousin is your benefactor.

To make corrections or additions to a memorial click Suggest Edits as below:


You can suggest birth and death places, more accurate dates, biographical information such as the text of an obituary or other description of the person's life, the inscription on the headstone, parental information (by Find a Grave memorial # only), their date of marriage, other spouses if applicable, etc. The edit screen is also where you can report a duplicate memorial for the person, and request management of the memorial for a loved one. 

Until I clicked the magic Suggest Edits link, I didn't understand why some memorials were plain and others loaded with information. The difference is each of us researchers. We can upload photos and other images (such as obituaries) too. Just click Add Photos, upload and write a caption. 

If nothing else, add a flower tribute, and make it personal if possible. If people want to contact you, they can click over to your Find a Grave profile -- so make that informative! Here's part of mine:


Virtual Cemeteries

The Legacy Webinar Reeling ‘Em in with Cousin Bait—10 Ways to Connect with Family by Cheri Hudson Passey suggests lots of ways to connect with cousins. I had done most of the other strategies except Virtual Cemeteries, so I started one with my mother and her family. Most of the relatives I had already connected together and uploaded obits or photos, etc., so there was not much to do but click add to Virtual Cemetery. But of course I found holes, which is part of the value of the exercise, right? Here it is that first Virtual Cemetery:


Once I fix the holes, it will grow a bit. Click to see the memorials. Of course then I was hooked, and created more. 

The one that shocked me was for my Goosic/Thompson great-great grandparents -- has 627 memorials! That was lots of clicking! I'm not sure how useful it is right now, because there is no search function as yet. That has been suggested, along with the ability to share "ownership" of a Virtual Cemetery. If I had it to do over again, I think I would create that large database more slowly, researching as I went. However, now that I have created it, I can always follow up when I've a yen for researching my Goosics again. I shared the link with my Goosic cousins and they can help find those holes and misinformation too. 

Here are my Virtual Cemeteries so far:


Ways to use Virtual Cemeteries

Find a Grave posted Using Virtual Cemeteries and a help file: https://support.findagrave.com/s/article/Virtual-Cemeteries. Lots of useful screenshots and ideas there.

Marilyn Schunke: 

I first used Virtual Cemeteries to bring ancestors of a certain surname together. Later I added a virtual cemetery for each generation... grandparents, 1st great grandparents,  2nd etc. I can then see at a glance how many I'm missing. The number should show 4 for grand,  8 for 1st grands,  etc. So if I had less than the required number, I went looking for the missing ones. I refer back to these frequently. -https://skcgs.groups.io/g/Society/message/1762

 

Lola Weber:

My list of virtual cemeteries is another way of looking at who all is buried in that cemetery….and if I’m missing a family member, I know to dig deeper! - https://skcgs.groups.io/g/Society/message/2017

 

Lisa Oberg: 

I wanted to add a couple of other ideas with regards to virtual cemeteries in Find a Grave (FG). If you make them public they are discoverable by search engines, such as Google. For that reason, I have been regularly making a couple of suggestions to Ancestry/Find a Grave for ways I think the virtual cemeteries could be even more powerful. If any of the following suggestions sound like good ideas to you, I would love to have others join in my quest for improving virtual cemeteries! Click on the Website Feedback link in the lower right corner of any page to make a suggestion.

* Ability to have more than one administrator for a virtual cemetery.

* Ability to add a cover photo to virtual cemeteries. Public virtual cemeteries can serve as a "front door" to FG when they show up in search results and visitors can connect directly to a virtual cemetery without having searched for a specific individual. For example, if you search for "university of washington wwi memorial" one of the results is a virtual cemetery.

* Ability to sponsor a virtual cemetery to remove ads. - https://skcgs.groups.io/g/Society/message/2028

 

Another idea I saw was creating a private Virtual Cemetery called "Do This" and adding memorials on which you want to work; removing them when they are finished. I like the idea of keeping Find a Grave ToDos right in Find a Grave. 😊

We welcome comments to the blog with more ideas and examples.

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Our editor has a request. Please send her stories over the next week or so of some Christmas and/or New Years traditions. 🎄


Valorie Zimmerman

  

 

 

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