I've been doing family genealogy for several years now but wish I'd started before my grandparents were gone. I miss having their input as well as hearing their recollections.

I'm presently researching memorials in various cemeteries. In particular National Cemeteries. I research the lives of these memorials and people as if researching my own family in an effort to link families together.

You have my permission to use any pictures of markers or cemeteries that I've added to Findagrave.

If you request an edit and I don't respond within 2-3 weeks, please message me. It's possible I didn't get your original request. Thanks.

TRANSFER REQUESTS??
Don't hesitate to ask. I feel it would be wonderful for relatives to manage memorials for kin. In your request, please include the memorial number (or a link to it) and your own Find-a-Grave member number. It is helpful when requesting a transfer to share info of kinship or if you are working on a particular project. Just sending a note, saying you want to manage something doesn't really explain the why of the request. Thanks!

If the person you request is a member of my family, I'll be happy to negotiate who might manage it.

I appreciate the many people who have added so much to FindaGrave! It's amazing to be able to locate ancestors and other kin via this site. A big Thank You to the many volunteers here!

** Just as a learning opportunity from another FAG member, 49717781, re place of birth pre WWI **

PLACE OF BIRTH = "AUSTRIA"? or "HUNGARY"? or "ITALY"? or "GERMANY" or "RUSSIA"? or "TURKEY"? etc - 3 of the major Empires pre-World War I

HISTORY AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT IS CRUCIAL IN GENEALOGY!
One of us (group this person works with) has extensive interest in the successor countries to the Austro-Hungarian Empire which existed until November, 1918

Most of the memorials we manage have some connection back to Imperial Austria (or are our family, or are both family and from A-H)

Use care in suggesting Place of Birth from these two countries. Someone who was born before 1919 might have "Austria" or "Hungary" as their place of birth written on their American death certificate, but in most cases, citing "Austria" or "Hungary" as their country of birth would be INCORRECT for F-a-G purposes which uses modern day geography.

Someone born, for example, in 1907 in "Austria" or "Hungary," could actually today list their place of birth anywhere between modern day Poland to the north, modern Russia or Ukraine to the east, modern Italy to the west, and modern Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the south and every modern country in-between. Before you send an edit listing "Austria" or "Hungary" as someone's pre-1920s birth country, please confirm his or her correct BIRTH VILLAGE to properly identify the correct modern country in the central Europe of today.

Similarly, some form of the word "Yugoslavia" only existed from 1929 - 1991, and that non-existent country's borders only go back to December 1918 with the fall of Imperial Austria-Hungary. Someone born or died outside these dates COULD NOT have been born/died in Yugoslavia, even if the document you are viewing lists it. That document was written during the years that Yugoslavia existed.

Another example, a U.S. marriage certificate from 1930 might list a 1907 place of birth as "Yugoslavia," or "Italy" but that person was actually born in Austria-Hungary and never heard of Yugoslavia or never considered eastern Italy as their home country until decades later.

Further genealogical research could, for example, identify a birth village in an Imperial Austrian Duchy or province such as "Krain" or "Styria." Krain (Carniola in English, Karnten in German) is today mostly within Slovenia, although Austria does have the province Karnten, and Styria (aka Steiermark) today straddles about halfway over both Austria and Slovenia.

Similarly, some western regions of modern Slovenia were, indeed, part of the eastern area of the Kingdom of Italy between and during the two World Wars; so a U.S. marriage certificate from 1942 might list "Italy" as their place of birth in either 1911 or 1921, but today that would be in Slovenia, while in 1911 it would have been Austria, and in 1921, it could have been "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes". There are hundreds of thousands of such examples from all over central and southern Europe.

Further research is required to identify the church parish or birth village of these people so as to determine in which country the village lies today. If the village can't be identified, it is best to leave the place of birth BLANK, then describe the new data and source information in the bio section; for example; "John Kovac's marriage certificate in 1942 lists his place of birth in 1909 as Hungary, which indicates that he was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and his name spelling suggests only that he was ethnically Slavic and not Germanic or Hungarian)."

As countries' boundaries change in the future, listing the proper village will ensure the place of birth is always accurate....Think of today's war between Russia and Ukraine....will those borders eventually change in the end, much as the former Yugoslavia countries' borders kept changing until 2007, and may yet change again!!