GENERAL: I use Find A Grave for researching my own family tree. I am also a cemetery "row walker." All the headstone photos I have taken and most of the memorials I have added have been from systematically photographing every headstone row by row in a cemetery and not from searching for these people specifically. Memorials without headstone photos have been created from death certificates and/or obituaries. Very few of these people are closely related to me. I'm just trying to help others who may be looking for burials or doing genealogical research. I do not "clean" headstones although I do try to remove enough debris to make them legible.

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PERMISSION TO USE PHOTOS: I waive all copyright rights to all my photos on Find A Grave and grant permission to copy, share, repost, and/or republish all of my photos without restriction, no attribution necessary.

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REMOVAL OF PHOTOS: Please don't ask me to remove headstone photos UNLESS 1) you have posted a legible headstone photo with a death date, and your photo was put on before my photo (this sometimes happens when memorials are merged); or 2) you have posted a headstone photo with a death date, and your photo is significantly more legible than mine; or 3) your headstone photo has a death date and mine doesn't. If you want to post your own headstone photo in addition to mine, go ahead. It's okay if a memorial has more than one headstone photo. The memorial manager can always move less appealing photos to the end so they're not immediately visible, and my one photo won't prevent you from adding your own photos. Per Find a Grave guidelines, each contributor can add up to 5 photos, and up to 20 total photos can be added to each memorial, plus 10 more if you sponsor the memorial.

I have never understood people whose sole purpose seems to be to remove memorials and/or headstone photos from Find a Grave. If you are one of these people, you are likely on the wrong website. Find a Grave is about adding graves and photos of those graves, not about eliminating them!

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TRANSFER REQUESTS: I honor all transfer requests regardless of relationship. I will transfer memorials outside of Find A Grave guidelines. To request a transfer, click on the "Suggested Edits" tab on the memorial you are interested in. Scroll down to and click on "Contact Manager". Type "Please transfer this memorial to" and your Find A Grave ID #. You do not need to explain how you are related to the individual or provide any additional documentation.

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OBITUARIES: DO NOT add photos of obituaries to my memorials. DO NOT send me retyped obituaries to post in the bio section. Obituaries are protected by copyright law, often contain information about living relatives which is a privacy concern, and may be offensive/upsetting to some Find A Grave members.

DO NOT POST PHOTOS OF OR RETYPE VERBATIM ANY COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL including, but not limited to, professional photos, studio photos, newspaper photos, stories, biographical sketches, newspaper articles, periodical articles, encyclopedia articles, obituaries, or information from published books and genealogies unless you created the material or have permission from the copyright holder. It is a violation of copyright law to repost or republish these materials without permission. It is not enough just to cite the source.

If you are determined to add an obituary or other copyrighted material, please just request a transfer. Then you can do whatever you want, and my name won't be attached to something illegal.

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EDITS/CORRECTIONS: I welcome individual/family photos and photos of legal documents (i.e., birth records, marriage licenses, divorce decrees, immigration/naturalization papers, land records, military records, or death certificates). These types of documents are not copyrighted. Please post photos of the documents rather than trying to retype all the information from them. Feel free to suggest edits to fill in blanks in the vital statistics section. I also appreciate corrections if I've made a typo or have the wrong information. I do attempt to verify any suggested edits using Family Search, Newspapers.com, death certificates, etc. There is no need to tell me where you got the information unless you have an obscure or difficult to obtain source.

In the bio section, I will accept additions that go beyond the vital statistics such as occupation, religious affiliation, social/fraternal organizations and societies, military service, education, hobbies, etc. However, I will generally decline or modify edits that merely restate information already available elsewhere on the memorial, edits naming surviving family members, or edits that include identifying information such as the person's address which could cause problems for surviving family members.

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DUPLICATES: It is never my intention to create a duplicate of an existing memorial; however duplicates do sometimes occur, usually because the earlier memorial is in a different/unknown cemetery or has a different spelling or name. If a memorial you created gets merged into one of my memorials, and you would like the memorial back, just contact me on the "Suggested Edits" page and ask for the memorial to be transferred back to you. If you notice that I have created a duplicate memorial for one of your memorials, just let me know, and I will delete my memorial and add any headstone photos I may have to your memorial if necessary.

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MY FIND A GRAVE "MIRACLE": After my parents died, I decided to start decorating family members' graves on Memorial Day again. I hadn't paid much attention to where exactly these graves were when my parents were driving us around to the various cemeteries, but I eventually found everyone except Aunt Gladys, my father's older sister who had died at a fairly young age during the Great Depression. We had decorated her grave every year when I was a child, so I knew the county where she was buried, but I didn't remember which cemetery. No cemetery was listed in her obituary. Her death certificate just said "removal" and didn't say to where. No funeral home was listed. There was no cemetery listing for her on Find A Grave, Billion Graves, Ancestry, or Family Search. The Midwest Genealogy Center had a book supposedly listing all the burials in that county, but Aunt Gladys wasn't in it. Aunt Gladys' husband and all of her children had died, so I couldn't ask them. None of my father's siblings were still alive, so I asked their children, my much older first cousins. None of them knew where she was buried. One cousin said she was buried behind a certain church, but when I drove down and searched for hours, there was no marker for Aunt Gladys. Since the county was an hour and a half from where I lived and very rural, and the cemeteries were generally unstaffed and not necessarily well maintained, I realized pretty quickly that it would be impractical just to drive around checking every possible cemetery there. The next day, I reluctantly decided to give up on finding Aunt Gladys's grave; I just didn't know where else to look to find the correct location. Since I couldn't help myself, I decided on a whim to try to help other researchers by checking the names from the county burial book to see if there were any people for whom I could create or enhance Find A Grave memorials. When I typed in what I later learned was Aunt Gladys' husband's grandfather's name (her husband was not buried in that county), there was a photo of an upright white Civil War Veteran's headstone and the longest "bio" that I have ever seen on Find A Grave; I'm sure it would have filled at least 3 printed pages. If it hadn't been so long, I would have just moved on to the next name in the county burial book. But, curious, I scrolled through the entire bio to see what there could be to say about an otherwise obscure Civil War Veteran. Most of it wasn't useful to me, but there, in the middle of the bio, there was a half-line that said, "beside him, Gladys [info redacted], unknown". It was Aunt Gladys! I think my heart must have skipped a few beats! I still get a lump in my throat thinking about the astronomically long odds against my choosing to type in names from what was essentially a random county (which I had never done before), going to a memorial for someone I had never heard of who was not even a direct ancestor of Aunt Gladys, and finding exactly the information that I had been searching fruitlessly for for so long. Surely God was guiding me that day! I drove to that cemetery, and there, behind a closed church, in the middle of a large, overgrown field with widely scattered, crumbling and decaying headstones, partially covered in knee-high grass and weeds, I found Aunt Gladys' notebook paper-sized, flat headstone. I would never have found it were it not for the upright Civil War Veteran's marker right next to it that I recognized from the photo on Find A Grave. There weren't even any other remaining headstones within about 50 feet. So, thank you to the people who took the time to write that extremely lengthy bio, and to everyone who has created memorials or taken photographs for Find A Grave. You never know who you might be helping!

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MY FIND A GRAVE WORK: All visible headstones with final death date markers installed have been photographed and posted as of listed date in the following cemeteries (except for about 20 memorials I added but for some reason negligently forgot to add the photo):

1. (**2.2**) Malta Bend Cemetery, Malta Bend, Saline County, MO, 2022 (Looking for a grave in this cemetery? See the burial listing and cemetery map at https://www.maltabendcemetery.org)

2. (**2.0**) Grand Pass Methodist Church Cemetery, Grand Pass, Saline County, MO, 2016; however, numerous markers in this cemetery are broken, unreadable, or missing

3. (**3.2** ) Floral Hills Cemetery, Kansas City, Jackson County, MO: Entire cemetery photographed as of 2019; individual gardens:

• 2019: Gardens of Last Supper (26), Time Eternal (31, 35), Companion (32); Lawn Crypts (27)
• 2020: Gardens of Redemption (25), Revelation (4, 5), Sunset (3), Little Angels; Freedom Mausoleum; Lawn Crypts (Trinity Section), Saints (2), Trinity (1)
• 2021: Garden of Eternal Hope (6, 7, 8), Tower of Faith Columbarium, Tranquility Mausoleum
• 2022: Gardens of Rose Croix (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), Resurrection, Courage (14, 17), Peace (57), Remembrance (50), Ascension (51); Frost Estate, Serenity Estate and Cremation Garden
• 2023: Gardens of The Christus (15, 16), Crucifixion (20), Devotion (21), The Good Shepherd (22)
• 2024: Gardens of Inspiration (40, 41), The Apostles (33, 34), Atonement (29, 30), Meditation (28)
• 2025: Garden of Gethsemane (23), Garden of Prayer (9, 10, 11), Garden of Sermon on the Mount (24)

4. (**2.3**) Brooking Cemetery, Raytown, Jackson County, MO, 2020

5. (**2.3**) Mount Carmel Cemetery, Raytown, Jackson County, MO, 2020

6. (**3.3**) Mount Olivet Cemetery and Mausoleum, Raytown, Jackson County, MO (This cemetery charges for burial lookups. Also, after Mount St. Mary Catholic Cemetery in Kansas City, Jackson County, MO filled up, many Catholics ended up buried here even though their death certificates/obits say Mount St. Mary.):

• 2020: Holy Family Mausoleum, All Saints Mausoleum, (missing a few I need a ladder to photograph clearly), Our Lady of Perpetual Help
• 2021: Saint Anthony, Holy Innocents
• 2022: Good Shepherd, Guardian Angels Mausoleum, Holy Redeemer Mausoleum, Ascension Tower Garden, Agony in the Garden, Carrying of the Cross
• 2023: Crowning With Thorns, Scourging at the Pillar, Crucifixion, Immaculate Conception
• 2024: Pater Noster, Sacred Heart, Legacy First Responders/Veterans Memorial, Saint Therese, Saint Joseph, Ave Maria
• 2025: Assumption

7. (**2.5**) Mount Nebo Cemetery, Grand Pass, Saline County, MO, 2022

8. (**2.5**) Grand Pass Community Cemetery, Grand Pass, Saline County, MO, 2022

9. (**3.0**) Green Lawn Cemetery, Kansas City, Jackson County, MO (Note: for some reason, there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of headstones in this cemetery with incorrect birth years according to other records. Also, burials in this cemetery are often erroneously listed in Memorial Park Cemetery, Kansas City, Jackson County, MO. The cemetery description says there is no clear separation between the two cemeteries, but that is false. Green Lawn is Gates 2 and 3, and Memorial Park is Gate 4. There is actually an incomplete stone wall, a small gully, and a winding road between them. Look at the cemetery map to see which sections in each cemetery mark the boundary.)

• 2023: Babyland, Sections 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 31
• 2024: Sections 7, 8, 12, 14, 17, 20 South
• 2025: Section 11, 20, 19

10, (**2.7**) Three Groves Cemetery, Lafayette County, MO, 2023

11. (**2.5**) Valhalla Cemetery, Waverly, Lafayette County, MO, 2022; however, numerous older stones in this cemetery are broken, unreadable, or missing

12. (**2.5**) Waverly Cemetery, Waverly, Lafayette County, MO, 2022; however, numerous older stones in this cemetery are broken, unreadable, or missing

13.(**3.0**) Memorial Park Cemetery, Kansas City, Jackson County, MO:

• 2025 Section 15

14. (**3.1**) Floral Hills East Memorial Gardens, Lee's Summit, Jackson County, MO:

• 2025 Garden of Meditation 11, short back section, front upright section

I'm currently working in:

1. Mount Olivet Cemetery and Mausoleum, Raytown, Jackson County, MO: Gethsemane

2. Green Lawn Cemetery, Kansas City, Jackson County, MO: Section 18

3.Memorial Park Cemetery, Kansas City, Jackson County, MO: Section 29

4.Floral Hills East Memorial Gardens, Lee's Summit, Jackson County, MO: Garden of the Good Shepherd 1

I'm also working on adding memorials for people who died in Jackson County, Missouri in 1974 from Missouri Death Certificates.

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SOME ONLINE GENEALOGICAL RESOURCES I'VE FOUND USEFUL:

1. https://www.deathindexes.com/

This site is a directory of state by state death indexes, death certificates, and other searchable records. The site includes both fee-based and FREE resources.

2. https://www.familysearch.org/site-map

Family Search is a website of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and is one of the premier FREE genealogy websites in the U.S. Create a FREE account, and then you can use the entire site and its Wikis. Also try Full Text Search, especially for people who might not appear in traditional records like the census! This site includes access to the Social Security Death Index.

3. https://www.mymcpl.org/research-and-learning/research-databases?interest_areas=483

This is a website for genealogy resources available through the Mid-Continent Public Library system including the Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence, Missouri (if you're ever in the Independence area, stop by and see what as yet undigitized resources this super-cool facility has to offer!). Some genealogy collections are available as PDF's, but a free or fairly low-cost library card (eligibility varies by residency) is required to access most databases such as Heritage Quest (U.S. censuses) or The Kansas City Star/Times. There are also links to databases you can only use inside or via WiFi in the parking lot of any Mid-Continent Public Library (including Find My Past (good for UK records), Fold 3 (military records), Newspapers.com, and FREE access to Ancestry).