"We want Find A Grave to remain a place of respect and remembrance, just like a real cemetery." The object of Find A Grave is to document burials, not make it a repository for highly personal details more appropriately posted on a genealogical website - or in some cases, better kept in your own private notes. Give some thought before adding to a memorial a personal detail you would not like added to your own memorial someday.

Graphic details about a death should not be included, nor should they name a perpetrator. Biographical information must not be placed in flowers. "Inappropriate notes will be removed, and members who continue to add inappropriate notes will have their account closed."

Please do not send suggestions based on unsourced entries found on an Ancestry tree or other genealogical website.

In the absence of an original birth or family Bible record, when a tombstone shows only years/months of age, was it because the deceased was EXACTLY that age or was it because the purchaser only asked for the age in years/months to be inscribed? Entries on Ancestry, without further documentation, are not proof.

Please don't ask for a town name to be added as a birth location when a birth clearly occurred in a rural location, regardless of what might have been written later, following the misleading practice of naming a nearby town. For example, I have received suggestions to add a town - before the town was even laid out. If you want a town name as a geographical point of reference, you can keep that in your own records. With a few keystrokes, you can add it in the bio section of memorials you create. When an obituary says born or died near a town name, don't ask me to change the location to the town. We pay the greatest respect to early residents by accurately noting where they were born, lived and died.

There are two separate indexes for Illinois deaths, in addition to a third for deaths in Cook County. The first is on the State of Illinois website. It was created by actual persons viewing death certificates. The second, on Ancestry, was created in part by optical scanning, sometimes affected by the inability to accurately interpret poor handwriting. The State of Illinois index is often, but not always, more precise than the second. The Ancestry index frequently omits township information. Complicating the accuracy issue, is the common practice of naming a nearby town. So before rushing to correct an entry I have made, it's important to view all available records when determining locations. And as recognized by experienced researchers (1) accuracy in death certificates is only as good as the knowledge of the informant, (2) ages/dates shown in census records, especially the 1900 census, are not reliably accurate.

This is the URL for a date calculator that clearly explains how ambiguous dates of birth occur:

https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Date_Calculator