Monday, August 20, 2012

Find-A-Grave Clean Up

Not sure how I feel about this, but ...

I have been cleaning up my database management system and filing some of my documentation. I was focusing on my Find-A-Grave sources. Did I find a shocker today. It appears that about 35 of Find-A-Grave memorials have been removed from the website. The good news is, that I had printed these memorials on paper so that I could mark them up.

As I was researching a small branch, I had come across a number of Memorials, on Find-A-Grave, where the burial (Cemetery) location was listed as "unknown". All from the SAME contributor. I thought it strange but those memorials confirmed some of the information that I already had and filled out a couple of families.

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing to research on this "unknown" cemeteries when I saw a picture of one of the memorials. Picture without a Cemetery? Strange ..... so I contacted the photographer, who had the same issue I did. Unable to contact the "owner" of the memorial. So I was back looking into these unknown cemeteries AND was working on my Citations for these burial facts. I changed how I was formatting the Citations, to bring them into the Evidence Explained!! format.

This is when I found all of these missing "Memorial Not Found" error messages. Since there wasn't a Cemetery listed, I did some searching for the Memorial Number, which I had from the print out. Memorial Not Found.

Since I knew a couple of cemeteries where they might have been, know the County they were in, I did some searching on Find-A-Grave. Still didn't find.

Sure, I have paper copies, and I was trying to get rid of the paper, so I am not sure how I feel about not having the back up, from Find-A-Grave, link to the memorial. All this means to me is back to researching these missing memorials.

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Copyright © 2012 by H R Worthington