Notes follow on:

EDIT SUGGESTIONS SENT TO ME,

GENDER FIELD,

MILITARY RANK as part of a person's name,

OBITUARIES,

TRANSFERS, and

OTHER GENEALOGY WEBSITES AS "SOURCES"

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EDIT SUGGESTIONS SENT TO ME -

First, thank you to all of the members of the Find-a-Grave community who have sent me countless edits to improve the memorials for folks i happened to be the first to come across. Unfortunately, i'm not in a position to make Find-a-Grave my life, so i manage many memorials that need more work. Your help is invaluable and greatly appreciated!

However, unless i have worked with you either on Find-a-Grave, through another genealogy platform, or personally, and am therefore familiar with your research, i attempt to verify ALL edit suggestions sent to me. This is not to denigrate the research ability of any particular person, but to ensure that information added to memorials is as accurate as possible. If i am unable to verify what was sent, i will send you a note through Find-a-Grave, asking for your source(s). If you are not receiving messages (which, by the way, i can understand!), i will try to reach you another way. If i cannot contact you, i will decline the suggestion(s). If your source is not readily available or apparent, you can save us both some time and effort by including your source(s) in a note sent with the edit suggestions.

Please note: From very considerable personal - negative - experience, i do not consider individual family trees or the smashed together one tree on familysearch.org as a reliable "source." The source is the place from which the information posted to that tree came. If you give "familysearch.org family tree" as your source, i will attempt to verify what you sent, but if i cannot do so, i will decline the suggestion.

Please don't take this verification process as a personal affront! Genealogical research can be very difficult and unclear - it took me months to untangle three boys with the same name, born within a 2-year period, in the same county in Pennsylvania! Hopefully, you would want the person who was managing your memorial to verify suggestions to ensure your information was accurate.

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GENDER FIELD -

I consider Find-a-Grave's 2023 addition of a "gender" field to be anachronistic at best. When it was first added, i dutifully filled it in, based only on the person's name. I then realized this field can be left blank, just as can all other fields (except name). I have received suggestions to fill it in, either as one of several suggested edits for an individual or when it is the only change suggested (usually as one of a batch of such suggestions).

I have been told that filling it in "adds one more piece of information" about a person. It does not. It adds a guess based on a name and possibly marital status - neither of which actually prove a person's gender identification. And no, not identifying with the gender assigned at birth is not something new, so i won't use that as a reason for assigning a gender to a person who died before last year.

I decline to fill in this field, just as i decline to use the 3-letter abbreviation for Find-a-Grave.

If you send me an edit suggestion to fill in this field, i will decline the suggestion, referring you to this statement. If the person is my family member, in addition to not filling in the gender field, i will not transfer the memorial. If I don't tell you the person is my family member, or explicitly state the person is not my family member, and you feel strongly that this field must be filled in, I will transfer the memorial to you upon request - no other questions asked.

Thank you for your inclusiveness.

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MILITARY RANK AS A PREFIX TO A PERSON'S NAME -

Over the years, i've received many requests to add a person's military rank as a prefix to their name. At first, i did it without much thought. Then i got a request to please remove it from the requestor's husband's memorial. Although she didn't have to, she gave a reason: her husband had returned from his military experience with significant issues which affected him for the rest of his life. (Those issues would probably now be called PTSD.) She said she frequently visited his Find-a-Grave Memorial, and having his rank as part of his name felt like a slap in the face. Another family member who provided an explanation said she was the daughter of the person. She noted that his military service was only 2 years of his life, but having his rank as part of his name made it seem as if it was the only important thing he ever did. I've received other requests to remove the military rank from family members. I've done so each time, although the rank appeared elsewhere on the memorial - just not as part of the person's name.

Thinking about this issue from a new perspective, i realized that not one of the requests to add a military rank to a person's name had come from a family member - they had all come from what I call "veteran-honorers" - folks who want to ensure that our veterans receive due recognition. I also realized this is an area where a family's interests and the interests of someone not part of the family, although completely well-intentioned, can conflict.

Find-a-Grave has now added a Veteran symbol by a person's name. This symbol recognizes veterans without having to also display their rank as part of their name. Based on the number of requests i've received to add this symbol, frequently with no other changes, it appears there are many veteran-honorers on Find-a-Grave looking for those whose memorials were posted before the symbol was added. I expect Find-a-Grave memorials for veterans will in rather short order all have the veteran symbol.

Going forward, i decline to add military rank as a prefix to a person's name, unless the person was career military or died while serving in the military. PLEASE NOTE: These also happen to be the military's rules for when it is permissible to continue to use the rank as a title. If asked to add the rank as part of the name, and the person does not fall into one of those categories, i will decline the suggestion, but will ensure that, if it doesn't already, the rank appears elsewhere on the memorial - either in the bio field or in the Inscription field if it is on a military plaque. If the person asking for the rank to be added is a family member, i will transfer the memorial upon request.

Thanks to those of you who fall into the category of veteran-honorers. My position is in no way intended to disparage our veterans or the work you have done, and are doing, to honor their service.

If you send me a request to add the veteran symbol, and the fact that the person served in the military does not already appear on the memorial, please include a source reference or citation to the service. You are the one asking for a change to be made, so the burden is on you to show proof that the person actually is a veteran. Thank you!

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OBITUARIES -

Please do not post obituaries to my memorials as clippings, or suggest that i add a transcribed obituary in the bio section, unless you include the source citation. Although newspapers provide a lot of useful information, without a source, the clipping or transcription can be next to impossible for someone else to find. A proper citation for a newspaper includes: (1) The correct name of the newspaper as shown on the front page; (2) the location of the newspaper (no, just the Springfield Gazette [or something similar] is not sufficient as there is a Springfield in every state in the US); (3) the day and date of publication; (4) the edition, if any; (5) the page number; and (6) the column number. If you use newspapers.com, please be advised that the name of the newspaper and the page numbers given may be incorrect. For instance, The Buffalo News, The Buffalo Evening News, and The Illustrated Buffalo News, are all shown on that website under the name "The Buffalo News." The editions are not indicated. The page numbers appear to be the "counts" for the number of pages scanned, and often have nothing to do with the actual numbers printed on the page.

I am not just being a jerk asking for this information. If someone is trying to find an obituary, they need this information. Without it, or with the incorrect information that might be associated with the scanned information, they will only be frustrated. Find-a-Grave is supposed to help people, not frustrate them.

Also, if the person has died recently enough that it is likely the identified-by-name-and-location survivors may still be living, i will ask you to take down the obituary. I am willing to transcribe it for you, but i will redact any such identifying information. I will also note that the obituary has been redacted because of privacy concerns for those survivors. I am fully aware that anyone with a legitimate interest can find the obituary - especially if the correct citation is provided - but the little search engines, that have no legitimate interest, can look someplace else for it, rather than on the memorials i manage.

I know if you scour every one of the memorials i manage, you can find some that do not adhere to my present understandings. That's because i'm human, and i learn. The reason i haven't gone back through every one of those memorials looking for this issue is because Find-a-Grave is not my life - I have other responsibilities, and a limited amount of time. If you come across a memorial i manage that you believe needs to be improved on this score, please contact me, identifying the memorial by number (unless you send the note through the memorial itself). Thank you!

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TRANSFERS -

I thoroughly believe folks should be with someone who knows them, not a complete stranger as i frequently am. I am very lenient about transfers, and expect you to be the same if a closer family member later asks you for a transfer.

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OTHER GENEALOGY WEBSITES AS "SOURCES" -

I have had bad experiences with certain genealogy websites. On one website, my own family is so messed up, i can recognize it only by some of the correct names mixed in with a lot of incorrect ones. I have tried to fix it, only to find out a month later it's been changed back to incorrect information. I do not like that website. I do not use that website. I do not trust the information on that website.

Because of this experience, and other bad experiences of lesser degrees with other genealogy websites, if you send me a suggested edit with the "source" being a genealogy website, i will ask you for primary sources. If you do not provide me with those sources, and instead tell me "This is a great website! It has all the information!," i will decline your edit. I have wasted too much time trying to verify information from genealogy websites that doesn't seem to be verifiable. I respect that your experience is different than mine. But i am not about to allow you to cite only that website, when actual sources are needed.