Find a GraveReviews of findagrave.com

Find a Grave can be a useful tool for tracing your ancestry. Like any site, it's chocked full of errors and can be misleading. My biggest gripe about Find a Grave are managers of memorials, who are more concerned with the number of memorials they manage versus maintaining them. When an individual is permitted to manager more than 10,000 memorials, it becomes a full-time job handling edit suggestions efficiently. It's very sad when quantity is more appealing than quality.

I been on Findagrave for over 11 years and it seems to be getting worse than better. Customer support is terrible. They delete memorials without letting the creator know. They have no way of blocking unwanted members from contacting you.. you got to accept all or none. So I finally decided none is the best option. Also the number of adverts is sometimes ridiculous. And they just increased the cost of sponsoring memorials from 5$ to 10$ and the new format is also terrible.. So I will not be sponsoring anymore memorials there. Or adding many more memorials there.. I have started to delete most of my memorials that were there. I will only keep the few that I sponsor. The ones I have a particular interest in I will move to my own websites. I do not feel like letting Findagrave make money off my research while they provide an unresponsive and toxic environment to persist.

Findagrave CAN be very beneficial to find and connect family members. However, there doesn't seem to be many rules to post information. There are a lot of errors. So, beware...... and do your own research. Once something gets posted, it's almost impossible to get it corrected. I used to use Findagrave often. But now, it's so ANNOYING with all the pop-up ads. I just gave up and don't use it very much any more. It's very frustrating to have to 'x' out on EVERY SINGLE PAGE.... They have to be making a fortune!!

I appreciate FIND A GRAVE as a site that can give far flung families a way to find relatives. However, there is a serious problem with the absence of “quality control.” I have discovered outrageous errors made by “super contributors” who (for instance) upload names from cemetery databases and fill in birth/death info with random dates. The Find a Grave customer service (so called) will not take action. When I tried, I received a series of replies suitable for “The Onion” or other parody. They pretended they did not understand my (carefully written) complaints. They won— I finally gave up. The other huge problem that goes unchecked are contributors who interpret the Find a Grave guidelines in their own particular way and hold huge numbers of memorials hostage. They treat all the memorials they manage as their personal property. For instance, some will not add a spouse or child link unless you can send a copy of the cemetery plot deed. State or other government records mean nothing to the petty “memorials tyrants.” Find a Grave offers memorialization for those not buried in a cemetery, but the “memorial Naziis” often only accept memorials with existing headstones. Again, Find a Grave customer service couldn’t care less. The site relies on ads. I would pay a fee (really!) to have a live customer rep, someone with authority to act, hear my complaint. It is discouraging to put effort into high quality research and documentation only to be thwarted by petty and/or incompetent bully members.