Wednesday, April 18, 2012

FIND A GRAVE MEMORIAL INFORMATION AND EXAMPLE




This should lead you to my Find A Grave page.  From there you can search for other
options.  My Find A Grave page

Below is the example I mentioned in the Post heading:
 http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=52366207
Memorial for Isaac A. Stone 1831-1900 at Butternut Valley Cemetery, Otsego County, NY

Updated 8/23/2018
As of 8/20/2018 Find A Grave changed to a New Site.  Having worked with the Old Site for over 8 years, I was very unhappy with  parts of the New Site.  However, since I no longer have a choice, I
am learning to deal with the new site.  There are still some kinks to be ironed out to make it more user friendly.

Above is an example of a Find A Grave memorial and all the information one can contain.  This is one of my Great Grandfathers.  Someone else had created the memorial and I asked for him to transfer it to me to
Maintain.  That way I was able to add all the information to Bio and link family members.  I love that tool to connect family members.  I still have more work on this memorial to try to link more of his children to him.

The Find A Grave website is free to check out and to add to.  Memorials are added to cemeteries all over the world by volunteers.   If they weren't added by some generous volunteer, the names don't show up in the  cemeteries.  So, consider adding memorials, especially your immediate family such as parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc.  Starting with your immediate family makes it less confusing to get started.  It is very easy to add the memorials and it can be done quite quickly as you go along.  Someone, sometime will find your information very special.

As an example of that, I actually found great great grandparents buried at the Holdrege Cemetery in Otsego County, NY when I had assumed all along that they were buried near Vermont.  Another nice find for me was Isaac's mother Polly Aylesworth Stone at the Verona Cemetery as well as a photo of her headstone.

As you will note from my memorial example, photos also can be added easily.  Whenever I visit cemeteries, I take photos of my family stones and any others that I know or find of interest.  Their lives are preserved and honored this way when you add the photos to their memorials.  You can also add flowers and leave notes to your heart's content.

You can request photos of headstones from volunteers that may live closer to a cemetery where that person is buried.  I'm on that volunteer list and as I receive requests, I check out the interments at those cemeteries.  I've found many cemeteries that way that I wasn't aware of.  I can't possibly fill all the requests, but if I am visiting one of the cemeteries, I try to look for requested names.  Once in a great while, I've been lucky and already have a photo of the requested headstone.

The other thing that I've been trying to do as I add the posts to this blog are to check to see if the person has a Find A Grave memorial. I need to know where they are buried, and if a cemetery is listed in the obituary, I can check to see if they are listed at that cemetery.   If not, I try to create a memorial for them and add the obituary to the Bio part and any other info like their marriage announcement.

To save you time in searching names at a cemetery,  just check MEMORIALS top left in the header and fill in the name of the person you are looking for.

Often you can come up with someone you are looking for on Find A Grave via Google and other search engines.  I've found an amazing amount of information when searching for my ancestors in the New England states way back to the 1600s.  Give it a try.  You will be excited with the info you can find.
Written by Donna Davenport 2012

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