I first got into Find-a-Grave when out of curiosity I did a Google search on my grandmother who had just recently passed away, and I noticed someone had entered her memorial here practically the instant her obituary appeared in the newspapers. I had always been very steeped in ancestry and family history, so this site really piqued my interest. I began to click around and noticed that vast numbers of my ancestors and recently departed family had already been digitally interred, though so many of them still hadn't been. What really got me hooked enough to register and create a profile is when I discovered that a remote family graveyard on an old piece of farm property that has been in the family for 200 years and was still owned by the same grandmother was listed on this site, but found that there were no entries for it yet. My mother and I discovered the rickety old cemetery in a thick grove of trees on a hill in a field after a long hike, and we tried to copy down as many names and dates as were legible, and took pictures. Most were ancestors, though some were not. Soon after, a distant cousin on ancestry.com provided me with a comprehensive list of those interred there. So I starting entering their memorials in the virtual equivalent of that cemetery here on Find-a-Grave.

For the greater part, I am only interested in creating memorials for ancestors and more recently-departed family members. I am not one of those who tries to enter every grave I come across in every burial ground everywhere in Great Britain and the United States, as some are in the habit of doing. My interest is purely genealogical. It is my belief that memorials should belong to the nearest kin who have an account on Find-a-Grave, and should be relinquished by those who have created them to relatives who request them, as I have often done. I'm not on this site to hoard memorials for every deceased person in history! My purpose is to provide records for other kin doing family research and to look up memorials to provide information for my family tree. But most of all, this is a place for us to remember and pay respects to dearly-departed and sadly-missed loved ones, and to honor our predecessors' place in history.

Some family surnames I am researching are Bayless, Beedle, Boots, Browne, Chantler, Coogan, DeBaun, Fol(t)z, Frazier, Fuller, Harmon, Harper, Horley, Howe, Hughes, Johnson, Kinsey/Kuenzi, Malady, Mossbarger/Mossberger, Myers, Nevels/Neaveill, Pearcy, Perkins, Potter, Powell, Proctor, Rhodenbaugh, Roffey, Schmittler, Siner, Sturm/Storm(s), Sullivan, Swaim, Troughton, Wampler, York(e).