Getting the Most Out of Find a Grave

hi my name is peter drinkwater and i'm a product manager at ancestry.com i work on the find a grave website and that's what we're going to talk about today is what finding grave is and how you can get the most out of it to me find a grave is a great success story of the internet it started in the mid 90s by a man who had a passion for visiting famous people's graves and then he would put the information on the website so he could share with other people pretty soon people from other parts of the world would send him information about famous graves they'd visited and he could add that to his site and then soon people ask if they could add information about their not so famous family members and fam and find a grave just grew from there so it's become this database of death information birth information other information about people but organized around burial and final disposition information and more than that it's this community aspect of finding a it's the community of find a grave that makes it what it is it's people all over the world who go out and add information to the site make corrections to the site add photographs to the site to build this great database that all of us can benefit from it's important to have that background as we start because it helps you to know what finding grave is and what it isn't um because memorials on the site can be built from someone just going out to the site and taking a photograph and then just adding only what's on the memorial headstone or they could be created by a database from a cemetery so in that case they wouldn't even have the the stone photo but they would have just the burial information or they might be added by a family member who knows a lot about the person has a lot of the biographical information and knows family members and can link all those together or it might be made by someone who doesn't have that information so each memorial is going to be a little different it'll have a different amount of information and whatever you find on find a grave you'll want to verify that in some other place this is all user contributed information so it's important that as you find that you know you check it with other sources and if you have a correction to suggest or if you have additional information to add we hope you'll join the find a grave community to help improve the site we don't have time today to cover a lot of the site but we'll cover a few things that i hope will get help you get the most out of it so let's start by looking at the home page here on the homepage you'll find a variety of things that you can do on the site from these general navigational points here at the top to different areas of the site to these registration or sign-in information here at the right which once you've signed in you'll see your account information here at the right then down to these active common activities that you might want to do on the site but the focus of the homepage really is around this search and that's what we'll start with today when you're using find a grave you can start with a really basic search something where you just add a first name and a last name and hit enter you'll notice that here for the search for ellen jackson we've got a thousand matches and that's a lot of matches to go through but first let me just show you how these results are organized you've got it shows you this the name that returned as a result of your search tells you their birth and death information if we are dates if we have it and then over here it shows you where they're buried on the left you'll see a thumbnail of the gray photo or whatever cover photo there is for the memorial or in this case you'll see that they don't have a gray photo so you can know that that's something that still needs to be added to the site you may also see some icons here next to these this one indicates that there's been a flower added or you may find a golden star which is indicates that they're famous or some other icons there now again a thousand matches is a little too much to go through but if we click this refine search here we can add some additional information some ways to narrow your search that are most helpful and most basic are just to add some dates that you know for the person or to add a location now i know that this ellen jackson died in 1999 i'm not exactly sure when she was born but i know she was about 100 years old so if i put in 1900 and i choose from this drop down here to say plus or minus 5 years and i hit search now it's going to narrow that to ellen jackson's who lived in that time period and here we've just got the one ellen jackson who lived there another way that you can narrow your search is by adding a location so in this case i know that ellen was born in biloxi or was buried sorry in biloxi in mississippi now in this location field you'll notice that as i start to type a location it starts to suggest locations that we have on the site so i've just typed the first part of biloxi here and i haven't put anything about the county but it's but it already shows that and does mississippi now if i didn't know biloxi was in harrison county but i could still add just mississippi and it would skip over the harrison county and still return that so if i click that and i hit search it'll still find l in there so that's a useful way to start to narrow your search by date or location now if your search is a little more complicated we have some more search options that you'll find next to the search button here on search if you open those you'll see a lot of choices and we won't go through all of those today but two that i will show you quickly one is if you use this similar name spelling option if you check that box then when you do your search when you put in the last name for example if i do a search for charles and i want to search for charles allender but i don't know if he was spelled with an h or with not an h if i put in just charles allender and then i hit search because i have that similar name spelling checkbox it will show results for all under with one l all under with two l's if i scroll down here i can see one with an h so that's a way that you can broaden your search just a little in case you're not familiar with that you don't know how it was spelled another option that can be helpful is this maiden name search so if i'm looking for someone that i know was her name if i say look for clara and i know her maiden name was lee but i don't know what her married name was i know she was you know she's my she was if she was my mom's sister i would know that her maiden name was lee but i didn't know what her married name was i could do that search for clara lee and just do a maiden name now that's going to return quite a few results um 150 1524 so if i refine my search another thing i can do is i can add this option for a spouse parent child or sibling so in some cases on the site memorials have been linked to each other with other family members now for example if i knew that clara's husband's name was hervey sort of an unusual name then i can add his name here and hit search and then it will narrow to just the clara lees that are that clara where the maiden name is lee and then she had a spouse named hervey so here i find clara lee antrim um who was married to hervey leroy andrum so those are a few tips about search let me just go back to the home page here you'll notice that on the home page you'll also see this option for search tips so you can click that to learn a little more about search as you come back to use that now sometimes when you're searching the site you're not looking for a memorial but you're looking for a cemetery so up here at the top you'll notice there's a tab for cemeteries and i can click that cemeteries tab and it will take me to a page where i can search for a cemetery i can search by name if i know the name of the cemetery i'm looking for i can look for the aberdeen cemetery and it will return a list of cemeteries that are named aberdeen cemetery with an indication of how many open photo requests how many memorials there are in that cemetery and where they're located in the cover photo for that or i can also search for cemetery by location so if i know i'm looking for a cemetery in west newton in indiana as i type that in and i select wes newton from the drop down you'll notice that the map here updates to that location now here on the bottom you'll see a key that tells you a little bit about what these different dots mean but if i click on this one that has a 2 that will zoom me in and show me the close closer view so that i can click on those and here we are here's the west newton cemetery in indiana it tells me how many memorials we have there now this is the number of memorials find a grave has it's not the total number of burials for that cemetery but of those five thousand ninety-two memorials that are on find a grave eighty-six percent of those have a photograph and then there are eight open photo requests if i click through i can go to the page for that cemetery where i can learn a little bit more about it find the address in some cases or some details about it that someone may have entered here i can also see some things that i can do at the cemetery again there are eight open photo requests at this cemetery so if i lived nearby i could go in and try to take those photos for someone or i could add a memorial do some other things here i can search just within that cemetery so if i look for our clara antrum we'll find her there so that's the way that you can use the cemetery pages and find a cemetery you're looking for if i click through to clara we'll look at what a memorial page looks like on the site here you can see whatever the cover photo is for her and you'd see a few other photos below if there were more or you could go to this photos tab to see all the photos here's the basic information about her birth death and burial whatever's been added to the site for her here's a bio that's been added for her and then some links to other family members and a flower that was added over here at the right you see a nice feature that allows you to search within that cemetery or within the city or you know gradually larger geographic areas for people with the same name so you can look for some people who may be relatives by just clicking on the name here in her case we've got her married name and her maiden name that you can choose from and then there are some options here where you can share this with other people using some basic share tools or you can save it so some different options you have for save or you can save to ancestry by clicking this it'll let you sign into your ancestry account choose the tree and the person you'd like to add it to and then add it right to them or you can save to a virtual cemetery which is a way to kind of organize people so if you have family members who are buried in different parts of the of of the country you can pull them all together into a virtual cemetery you could also use virtual cemeteries for not family members you could do it for a class in a high school class or a military group or something like that you can also copy to your clipboard all the data from this and paste it into a family tree program or you can print it out here there are also some tools here for adding or requesting a photo let's talk next about some ways that you can contribute to the site because a couple of them are right here on this memorial page one of the simplest and most helpful ways to contribute is this suggest edits button so if you come to this page and you see something and you know additional information or if you see something that's wrong if you click this suggest edits button it will allow you to open up this page where you can type in a middle name if it's missing for example or correct a birth date or add some additional information that you might have then you click the save suggestions button and that will send it off to the manager of the memorial who can evaluate it and decide how they want to update the site the memorial page based on the information you've provided another way that you can contribute is simply by adding a photo so in this case we've already got a great photo but if you had a photo of clara you could upload that just by clicking the add photos option selecting the photo or dragging them from your desktop and putting them here and that will upload it to this page and that's a great contribution to make you could request a photo or in the case of another if like like we saw in those maps if you go out to your local cemetery and there's some open photo requests you could go and take a photo for someone and upload that to the site up here at the top of the page you'll see this contribute tab and that's a tab where you'll find some of the most basic and and helpful ways that you can contribute you'll see them there we'll talk about two of those today one is to add a memorial so if you click this button the first step is to choose the cemetery where you'd like to add this head where the where the memorial that you're adding is bay is it's found um and then we could say that's in the west newton cemetery in indiana continue now uh here you'll notice it's not buried in a cemetery if someone's been cremated or some other way you click that and that will give you some options there but here we'll choose this west newton cemetery i would just type in the name and information that i've got for this person and click add memorial and that will create a new memorial for the site once it's been added you can go put up a photo or you can do other things that you'd want to another good way to add new memorials to the website is to start with photographs of gravestones so you can go out to your local cemetery and take photos along the rows of gravestones and then bring those back and upload them to the site our preference would be that you take those photos with the gps enabled phone or camera so that when you upload the photos it also brings the gps coordinates with it so that the memorial can have a specific location that'll help as people who want to go visit that memorial come to the site they can go and find it more easily so once you've taken those photos you just come back to this contribute page and you click the upload photos button here you type in the name of the cemetery where you've taken your photos and then indiana and you select that photo and you say okay i want to select my photos you find them in your drive and you just select you can select one multiple you can do as many as you want let's do one now for the sake of time but you upload that photo and that will go into a queue for to be transcribed for the first seven days that it's in that queue you're the only person who'll be able to transcribe it but after that it'll go out to the find a grave community and people will volunteer and help to do that so if you just like taking the photos and you don't like doing the transcription don't worry after seven days it'll go out to the community and they'll help you do those transcriptions once they've been uploaded you can click this transcribed photos or there's always the transcribe button up here at the top of the page that will take you to a page that shows you the photo you've uploaded here it's upside down so i'll rotate that and then i can type in the information that i find here on the memorial if there's more than one person on the memorial once i've typed in the first person i'll just say melba and wheat you'll see this add additional person button appears and i can click that and i can add the other people that are on that memorial as well i'll click add transcription and that will create a memorial from the site and add that photo to that memorial so those are a couple of great ways that you can add new memorials to the website i want to take our last few minutes just to share with you a couple of things that you can do with the app that we've built for find a grave that's available for iphone or for android i'll share my phone screen with you so that you can see what that looks like we built the apps for the for the site to make it easy for you to go out and particularly when you're out in the in the field and you're using them in the in the cemetery you can actually use your web browser on your phone to access the site it's been designed so that it scales well and fits on your web browser but when you're out at the cemetery the find a grave app is a great way to quickly see what's out there and what you need to do when you first open the app you'll come to a screen like this that'll show you some options that you have you can either do a memorial search or a cemetery search you can see some of the things that are available to you there i'll show you quickly two ways that i like to use the app when i'm out there one is just to tap on this cemetery search option when you tap on that because of the location services on your phone it knows where you are and it chooses the closest cemetery to you with this assuming that you're in that cemetery so if you just tap on the name of the cemetery there it'll open the cemetery page for that cemetery here you can see if there are any open photo requests for the for the cemetery you see it there so you can go out and fulfill those you see how many memorials we have for the photo you have an easy way to add grave photos so you can upload photos for transcription here just click that button and you can take a bunch of photos of all the different graves and then come back and transcribe them later or you can add an individual memorial one thing i like to do when i go out to the cemetery is just to tap on this number of memorials that are there and what that'll do is it'll show you a list of all the memorials that we have it shows you the image that we have for them the name and the birth of death years you'll notice that on this one we have these two icons next to it the camera icon indicates that we don't have a gray photo yet for that memorial so you know hey there's one that i need to take a photo for or this this pin icon indicates that we don't have gps coordinates so for a lot of the memorials that we have on the site the photos were taken before gps was readily available so you could go out to the site and you can just add only the gps if you add a new photo to this to the memorial it will add the gps with the photo as well so i can come out here and i can go out to the i'm out of the cemetery and i and i can do a search i'm here i say i go out and i'm standing over a gravestone there i can type in a search and i can see okay i'm looking at this gravestone for someone named gary lynn draper and i see here quickly that it doesn't have a photo so here i can either click through and then you'll see just tap that add gray photo say you can either take a photo or you can choose one that you've already taken and upload that right to his page if i also in the iphone app you can just swipe to the side there and tap that now if you already had a photo and i only need to add gps while i'm standing next to his grave if i just tap that add gps button that will add the gps i won't do it here because i'm not standing over his grave but that's a great way that you can add additional information you can see what's available see what you need to do and then you can take those photos and then having those gravestone photos is another great way to use the app as you're out there just to take those photos upload them you can transcribe them on the app but it's probably easier to come home and do it on your computer where you can see those things a little better so there's a quick overview of some of the things that you can find on find a grave and some of the ways that you could be part of the community and contribute to the site if you're wondering where to get started i'd suggest coming out to the side and doing a search if you don't find anything for someone that you're looking for you could create a new memorial with the information that you have if you do find one and you find that there are errors or the something that needs to be added you could contribute by adding making those suggestions to the current manager of the site another way to get started would be to go to the cemetery page see what local what cemeteries we have in your local area and then going out to those cemeteries see if there are any open photo requests you could help with or just taking photos of grades that haven't been documented yet i definitely encourage you to get that app and take that out there if you're going to go out to the cemetery it'll make things a lot easier for you and especially help as you get those gps coordinates for the memorials well that's about all we have time for today hopefully something that we talked about today will help you have an idea of what you can do next time you come to the site to get more out of find a grave thank you

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 4,293

Rating: 4.9649124 out of 5

Keywords: family history, find a grave, family tree, death records, family history research, find a grave app, ancestry, genealogy, rootstech 2021, cemetery records, ancestors, familysearch, rootstech connect 2021

Id: KlZbXzngsFI

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021