About Me:

When you know where you come from, it changes everything!

∼My paternal great grandparents were Jack and Mary (Drappeau) Sully, Joe and Sarah "Sallie"(Moore) Prue. My paternal grandparents were Claude and Hermine (Prue) Sully from Okreek, SD. My family still makes their home on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation today. I have very deep roots in Todd, Tripp, Charles Mix, Gregory, Mellette, Lyman, Brule, Buffalo and Bon Homme Counties of South Dakota. Myself and all my immediate family are enrolled in Rosebud, but our blood is mostly Lower Brule (Yanktonai), Yankton (Medicine Cow Band), Santee and Oglala (and possibly Northern Cheyenne too but I'm still sorting that one out).

My maternal family comes from Texas mostly with roots going back to Tennessee and Virginia. I have deep roots in Brown, Hill and Dallas Counties of Texas. My maternal grandparents were Hubert Foster, of Brownwood, TX and Lenora Wilson of Dallas, TX. My 5th great grandfather was Edmund Jennings Randolph, 1st Atty General of the United States and 7th Gov of Virginia, part of the Constitutional Convention, 1st cousin to Thomas Jefferson, grandson to William and Mary Randolph of the College of William and Mary.

Generally, my family surnames are Sully, Prue, Kincaid, Drapeau, Goulette, Moore, Fredrick, Graham, McGhee, Long Crow, Waugh, Houston, McCloskey, McBride, Fast Horse, Cordier, Bravebird, Colombe, Crazy Bull, Red Shirt, Deon, Blackbird, Langdeaux, Hollow Horn Bear, Eastman, Roubideaux, Blacksmith, Packard, Reynolds, LaRoche, Renot, Duncan, Wheeler, Galbraith, Moran, Kindle, Waln, Short Bull, Cournoyer, Desersa, McKenzie, Keeler, Ladeaux, Night Pipe, Baker, Hudson, Janis, Clifford, Jordan, Eagle Tail, Foster, Wilson, Averett, Hamilton, Baggett, I could probably add more....I am that cousin who counts ALL my cousins!

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Pet Peaves:

1.) FAG Memorial Managers who DO NOT manage! If Edit Suggestions are too much to be bothered with, then don't manage.

2.) Labeling Photos incorrectly. A photo of a person or a cemetery or a census record or a flag is not a grave photo. If it is not a readable GRAVE marker, DO NOT mark it as such. Please for the love of accuaracy, mark photos correctly. How is anyone taking photos of graves to know your loved one needs a photo if their second grade baby tooth picture is marked as a grave photo? In cemeteries with 200+ graves, I just click on the No Grave Photo filter to see who doesn't have one so I can take a picture. If its marked as having a grave photo, I just walk on by and your loved one won't get a photo of their grave marker.

3.) NAMES…..I could say so much right here. But I will stop with just these two comments, only two. 1. If a person's name is Mary Smith and Mary married Joe Smith, please do not Suggest that Mary's memorial read as Mary Smith Smith. Unless you walked into the court house with Mrs Mary Smith and watched her have the court clerk change her name legally from Mary Smith to Mary Smith, or went with Mrs Mary to the DMV to change her name from Mary Smith to Mary Smith, I will NOT, denote her maiden name if it is the same as her married name. Her parent's names can be the notation that she was already Mary Smith prior to being Mary Smith. 2. If when Joe Smith died, and Mrs Mary Smith married Joe's brother, Fred Smith, please do NOT request her name to be Mary Smith Smith. The two husbands can be added as spouses and normal logical thinking adults can already conclude that she had 2 spouses with the same last name.

If I had to type this, then yes, these are real suggestions received.

I will make one exception to this: If Mrs Mary Smith's family, had her gravemarker engraved with Mary Smith Smith and a picture of such marker, I will edit and make the change.

Transfers:

If you want a family member's memorial transferred, just ask. Tell me your relationship. It's helpful for me since the memorial may be someone I am related to also or someone I knew personally as friends. Your relation does not have to fall within the very scrict guidelines of FAG family definitions for the transfer. And you don't even have to be related at all. Just let me know why if its not related. I get it. I manage my 2nd and 3rd cousins who were my close friends or the spouses of cousins, or high school classmates, etc. I also have requested memorials for the sole purpose just to "fix them". It's easier to fix family trees when you manage them. I will usually tell the manager that's why I want it, just in case, it is their family, etc.

So far, I have never denied a Transfer Request. Family should be with Family. Oddly enough, I have to repeatedly ask for my direct line relatives, that do fall within the FAG family guidelines to be transferred from managers who will not give them up. (My rule of thumb: If your relationship to the person is closer than my relationship, then it's yours. If I am not related at all, it's yours).

Ask and you shall receive.

Pictures: Any picture I have taken of a grave or picture I have posted may be used elsewhere without my consent and I do not need photo credit. I do not know why this is a thing, but apparently, it is. (I also do not need credit for an Edit Suggestion). If I have posted a picture/document/record that you would like taken down, please use the contact manager feature in edits to send me a message with the reason, especially if its inaccurate or if you feel it is inappropriate. My intentions are never meant to harm or disrepect the person's memorial or offend their family member. Please note, Managers cannot remove a picture that they did not post. If I didn't post the picture, you will have to contact the person who did.

Edit Suggestions FOR me: I will accept the changes as quickly as I can and I do login daily most days. If possible, try to give me some where to look to verify if necessary. I am not going to research EVERY request I get. If you took the time to do the research and have submitted an edit, especially if its your family or a tree you have been working on, I will defer to you and your suggestion. Believe me, if it's wrong, someone else will come along and let me know with another edit suggestion. Please do not come at me, with education on how a PVT, if he didn't die as a soldier should not be labeled as such. Just suggest an edit. I have only created about 10% of memorials I manage. If there are errors, I, most likely did not create the errors, I inherited them. Most memorials will have some errors, that's why there is an Edit feature. I promise, I am not that manager who will sit on edits for 21 days to let FAG do it for me.

DOB, DOD, Name Spellings: I usually defer to the gravemarker itself even if it is incorrect. Why? Because this is not Ancestry or Family Search. It is Find a GRAVE. It is the documenting of the GRAVE MARKER. If there is a big discrepency of birth days or death dates, I will usually notate such in the BIO. I will also try to notate Name Spelling Variations in the BIO. I am not going to edit the Name section with 4 or 5 name variations. I will just defer to the headstone. If no headstone, I will defer to what the concensus of the sources cite. I do make exceptions: Here's why. I want the family looking for family to find their family! If I, or other managers, keep monkeying around with all these names, people will not find their family.

Example: I personally have a family name with many variations. Drapeau, Drappeau, Drappeaux, Drapeaux, Drappo.....Why Narcisse Drapeau, didn't have a family meeting and say "listen up gang, here's how we are going to spell the family name", is beyond me, because it was needed. So I struggle with how to document them. I have searched for Drapeau's only to find that I didn't find the person I was looking for because I didn't know how they spelled their name. I usually defer to the headstone, but sometimes I don't. So when making the request to change from what the headstone says, tell me why. That way I will understand why a change might be necessary or appropriate.

Many obituaries do not always "protect the living". If there is a memorial that is sharing too much information that was not already previously shared publicly in newspapers, memorials, funeral home websites, death notices, facebook, etc., please submit a request to change that information. Memorials are not meant to be an invasion of a living person's privacy and I would like to respect their wishes.

Edit Suggestions FROM me: I love helping to connect families, my own and strangers. I often will submit an edit that I hope will in some way, help others find their family, by adding spouses, children, parents, DOBs, DODs, and name corrections to include nicknames, married names or maiden names. I submit alot of edit suggestions and sometimes to the same managers over and over. It's usually because they manage many memorials in cemeteries where my family is also or its because I just photographed alot of graves in that cemetery where they have created many memorials. It's only coincidence. There are managers, that literally, when I see they are the managers, a physical reflexed response, such as a heavy sigh and eye roll cannot be stopped. If I can take the path of least resistence, I swear, I will. (Ex. a husband and wife that I want to connect together, I will purposely choose the manager who manages edits within reasonable timeframes to do the edits, as opposed to the manager who will ignore edits, on purpose because they are annoyed). (Sidenote: If you are not one of "those" managers, then don't be offended....I am not referring to the mangers who don't do this, or to the managers who are in South America currently backpacking Machu Picchu for a month or on vacation on a beach in Jamaica, or in the hospital, or getting chemo twice a month, or dialysis 3 times a week, etc. I am referring to the managers who are spiteful....and they do know who they are.)

If it seems I am being unkind to you in any of our FAG dealings, I apologize. Sarcasm cannot always be detected by others and humor may not be humorous to the one receiving the response. My intentions are never to be unkind on purpose. Sometimes, I may just get to the point with facts or requests, etc, and that too is never meant to be unfriendly, just factual. There are managers who are rude, mean, ignore requests, and spiteful. I hope that my interactions in any correspondence to a fellow FAGer is not rude, mean or spiteful and please let me know if I am coming across that way to you in any interaction. My intentions are to be helpful and courteous and I may joke with you and you should let me know if my sarcasm and jokes are not amusing to you.

If my profile offends, it's probably because you are one of the mean and spiteful managers. I once had a manager respond to me (when I asked if she could possibly take a look at my edit that had been suggested after 18 days) by saying:

"Good Gravy! What is wrong with you and why are you so impatient? You only requested this 18 days ago. I have a life too you know!"

I promise I will never say that. When I can no longer keep up with the memorials I manage, I will transfer to family or FAG.