FindAGrave Errors

Many years ago I signed up for an account on FindAGrave.com so that I could create a page for my grandfather and that was all. I never used it again. I look at FindAGrave memorial pages frequently but I never made another memorial page.

Yesterday I came across my grandmother's page on FindAGrave. She was listed as Clarence Agnes Earle when in fact her name was Clare Agnes Henry Earle. I reached out to the page creator and then realized that there is a tab at the top that once clicked allows you to send suggested changes to the creator. Then I learned that if you are an immediate family member of the individual memorialized on the page, you can claim it if the individual has passed less than a year ago or if the creator is willing to relinquish it. So that is what I did! I am now the manager of my grandmother's page. But I now also have two FindAGrave accounts by accident really. C'est la vie.

As grandma's page manager now I can do a bunch of things like link her parents' memorial pages to hers. As well as choose whether or not to let it be known that I am not only her page manager but also her grandchild. Fancy.

However extremely useful a resource FindAGrave is for genealogy research, a lot of novice genealogy researchers do not understand that FindAGrave is not a record. FindAGrave is a free online resource that helps people locate burial sites of individuals, primarily in the United States, but also internationally. In addition to searching for graves, users can create memorial pages and contribute information about the deceased whether to commemorate loved ones or to share local history information. It is a crowdsourced resource though, fraught with well-intentioned errors. It does not typically connect to vital records confirming the dates of death and relationships detailed on the memorial page. It does not even always show an image of a headstone, if one exists. The memorial page could be built by anyone; a family member, a cemetery employee or volunteer, etc. FindAGrave memorials are not vital records.

Use it, of course! Tell them Clarence Agnes Earle sent you.

....but remember that all genealogical "facts" need to be corroborated by independently created resources.

Serendipity in DNA Research

Once again, something remarkably serendipitous has occurred in my genealogy/DNA research.

A few years ago, my father’s cousin learned he had a daughter he had unknowingly fathered in the Philippines during his service in the Vietnam War. Things like this are happening all the time now with the inundation of direct-to-consumer DNA testing available. People are finding out deeply buried secrets about paternity and parentage; connections that might not otherwise had been discovered if not for the ubiquity of DNA testing.

The organization that brought my Cousin Anna Lisa to our awareness is called Father Founded. They are dedicated to supporting Amerasians, individuals of mixed American and Filipino heritage, in their efforts to connect with their American birth fathers, typically former GIs. These connections can have profound impacts of the individuals involved and their families; sometimes negatively but hopefully positively, as was the case for my family. Sometimes the birth fathers reject their Filipino children, which is truly heartbreaking.

I have worked on two cases for this organization. In my most recent case the man had two rather high DNA matches, who I will call M and C. They turned out to be siblings to one another. I can tell from the amount they shared with my client that they were most likely first cousins to whomever was my client's bio-father. Those top matches share 481 cMs ad 396 cMs respectively with my client; cMs stands for centimorgans, the unit of measurement for DNA. Those sibling's had a mother who was an only child and their father only had one sibling. That one sibling had two sons. It could only be one of those sons who fathered my client.

After sending Ancestry messages to my clients top matches, I went looking for M and C on social media. Not only did I find that they were both FaceBook friends with the one living, possible bio-father, M and I had a mutual FaceBook friend; a woman who grew up across the street from my grandparents in the home my Cousin Anna Lisa's bio-dad grew up in. Small, small world.