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The Common Room / Re: Find A Grave biographies
« on: Thursday 12 October 23 10:52 BST (UK) »I'm sure there's a lot of good contributors to Find A Grave but I had a bad experience with them when Ancestry hints alerted me to information that had been taken from one of my websites and used to not only say where and when they were buried but to build biographies. Some information is family folklore and can be quite sensitive and is not what you want to see on a grave site. Some information evolves over time and the grave site remains stuck in time while original research has moved on. Some contributors just want to hoover up other people's information and are careless when it comes to accuracy and etiquette.
C
Just wondering - after your bad experience - did you contact the Find a Grave contributor and ask them to remove the sensitive information? Hopefully they did?
They denied copying it. It was a very frustrating experience. I remember telling them all the mistakes they made copying the information I was trying to get them to correct them. I washed my hands of it all in the end and put it down to experience. I'm more careful now about posting burial details. It also put me off research in general to an extent because there are horrible people out there that can steal your stuff and do things with it and it's too much bother.
C
That's a shame to hear.
I wouldn't have copied information in that way in the first place, but if someone contacted me and pointed out potential errors in my research, I'd like to think I would have the common sense and good grace to listen and make appropriate corrections.
I suppose it's possible that the Find a Grave support team would have been willing to help, especially if any sensitive information needed to be removed.
I've just had a look and it looks like some things have been changed since I last looked but there's a very obvious mistake of a relative who emigrated to Australia being on Find A Grave as buried in England. I'm not going to look further it's not worth the work now. I see that the contributor has now died perhaps their lack of manners was down to their age or health issues or maybe they just got too big for their boots with their access to information.
C
I know you have decided not to pursue it, but if the contributor has died, it might be fairly straightforward to contact Find a Grave support and ask to take over that memorial, and then you could correct it properly.