Thursday, October 22, 2015

Finding Graves

I love history and genealogy. I have posted on various genealogical forums and turned have to many over the years while working on my ancestry and just for fun.

I have contributed to several websites to post information on my ancestors and family members and to post info and photos for others over the years

One website, Find A Grave, I signed up with over ten years ago. It's fun, and when things are going well, perfect strangers go out of their way to help people out. I have been helped many times by these people who share a love for genealogy, by them giving me information and taking photos of graves and posting them on the Memorials I created. I've created over 300. Not many compared to some.

I have also learned where several of my ancestors were buried from the help of distant cousins or just fellow enthusiasts. This is what is great about Find A Grave and many of the other forums. People at their best.

Then, of course, there are the nasties. These are people who represent everything bad that can happen when working online. The worst site for these type of petty, domineering, and arrogant people was Wikipedia. But, I've discovered them on Find A Grave too.

The latest is an anonymous person from Texas, I'll assume it is a she. She has websites and postings all over the internet regarding genealogy. She also has contributed a massive amount of graveyard listings. While this is all well and good, she in the last two days has fixated on my contributions to the website.

Since, she appears to just go out to cemeteries and take pictures and create memorials, I guess she doesn't appreciate people, like me, who add memorials for ancestors. Sometimes, I have not located where my ancestors were buried. I had many this way, until some good person or other who knew where the person was buried would add the information.

This Texas woman however, was e-mailing me telling me to stop linking memorials with other memorials, especially ones where I have "unknown" listed under burial. In ten years this has never been a problem, and like I said, I have learned the burial locations of many this way.

So, I first got two e-mails and a recommendation to remove my links for a John Cocke. Since I don't know where he's buried I obviously shouldn't link him to his parents memorials?! Huh? One of her e-mails incorrectly accused me of having a duplicate memorial with another crazy lady who was one of the first knuckleheads to cause me problems at the site, but that's another story.

The other message told me to stop linking parents and children via the memorials. Anyway, I ignored her communications. Why answer when I didn't have anything nice to say?

Well, today, I had to respond because she wrote me again. She seems to have misinterpreted the "rules" that Find A Grave had on its FAQ page. So she began quoting from some of these rules. Obviously, she is right and can't be ignored! My question since thousands of people have listed memorials for people with unknown burials, is - why is she focusing on me?

I hate this type of behavior. You never know what is wrong with people like this you run into on the internet, but I felt like I had to respond.

And thus I wrote this:

I don't know what has set your focus on me, but I'll ask you to please stop. Firstly, I notice that your e-mail address doesn't have @findagrave attached to it. So, I guess you are not an official organ of the website. Secondly, trying to delete legitimate links on Memorials is a form of vandalism.

Writing erroneous messages suggesting that Richard Cocke is the same as another Richard Cocke isn't helpful. 

If you intend to write everyone on Find A Grave telling them that their memorials aren't allowed, than you better get started. 

In the meantime please stop bothering me. 

It's always a danger to engage with people like this because they could try to cause a whole slew of problems... But sometimes you have to respond.

I'll just end this because there is not much more to say. I just wish people will cool their jets; stop trying to tell everyone what to do; and go out and take more cemetery pictures!

No comments:

Post a Comment