We’ve been working hard on some updates to the site and today we rolled a few of them out.
A lot of today’s changes are smaller tweaks and bug fixes that you may or may not notice, but there are a couple of things that are worth talking about here:
Find a Grave in Other Languages
For the past year or so, we’ve had a dropdown menu in the footer that says, “Language: English,” but as you’ve probably noticed, it didn’t do much. With today’s update, you can now choose to use the site in:
This is our first pass at translating the site and we’re pretty excited about it. We hope it will make it easier for more people to be part of the Find a Grave community.
Even with all our work on the translation, we’re pretty sure we’ve missed something or the translation could be improved. If you notice something that needs fixing, please send us details about the problem at feedback@findagrave.com.
Suggesting a Merge
We really appreciate the work people do to let us know when there are duplicate memorials on the site. In the past, the process for letting us know about duplicates and for us to merge the memorials has been labor intensive and we’ve gotten pretty far behind on processing your suggestions. Today we rolled out some new tools that we hope will help make that process easier for everyone.
Toward the bottom of the edit/suggest edit page for a memorial, you’ll now find a button that says, “Report duplicate memorials.”
If you click that button, you can put in the memorial id for the duplicate memorial and quickly submit that suggestion to the support team. The support team has some new tools that will help them process your suggestions more quickly. All suggested merges will be reviewed by the support team and the decision to merge or not to merge will be based on the same criteria we’ve used for merging in the past.
Special thanks to those of you who participated in our testing of this new process. As with the translation, we hope you’ll send us a message at feedback@findagrave.com to let us know what you think of this new merge suggestion tool.
[This post was updated 31 Jan 2019 because we updated the text on the button.]
Tried new merge, went thru very quickly (under 10 min), memorial being merged had stone photo, merge into did not. Updated memorial now has photo, but still indicated as no photo.
Thanks for letting us know about this. We’ll get that fixed.
Awesome news! I knew of the new merger system in the works and I can’t wait to try it out myself. As you said this will be a huge relief to edit@ and I can’t wait to see what is next on the list.
When using the merging option, which owner retains control of the newly merged memorial?
Thanks for asking. Just like we did before this tool, we’ll decide which memorial to keep based on some default criteria (the first memorial in the correct cemetery will be kept and a marked cenotaph in a cemetery is kept over alternate dispositions (i.e. burial/lost at sea, etc)) and then consider other factors. If you have information that you think is important for us to consider, please add it in the box for notes at the bottom of the screen where you review the details of the two memorials.
In the past, I have had some contributors create a memorial and put it in the category of no cemetery. When they find it, which has been mine sometimes, they send me a message saying mine is a duplicate. I know this is not correct because I have been the first one into the cemetery and who documented the whole thing. I asked one of the contributors how she created a memorial in the cemetery before it was created on FAG? She totally ignored my question.
I knew someone who as testing it and was excited to hear about it. I didn’t expect it to be rolled out so soon. Thanks!!
Love this new edit option. Have notified members in the past of duplicates with no response. Now we need an edit option for wrong cemetery notification. Thanks
Curious about updates. I have been sending the ‘edit suggestions’ in on my famiy members. Updating has been trying to connect parents, spouses, children… As well as DOB and DOD. I have heard back from a couple that the edit went thru.
Essentially, who is responsible for updating? Is there a certain timeframe we should give them to update? What if they are no longer alive… Then who is the ‘owner’?
With the auto approval feature, edits are now automatically approved after 21 days if the manager of the memorial does nothing – or if the manager is deceased.
If the manager has been marked as deceased (linked to their memorial page from their Find A Grave profile page), then the edits sent over the edit tab usually process within a few days.
Will you be adding a way to view merge requests similar to being able to view requests (parent links, etc) on memorials? I added several merge requests last night but there doesn’t seem to be a way to view them.
Photo requests should be delete if a note is sent that the grave is UNMARKED!! There are son many
just taken up FAG space. I have sent several notes to the requesters, but they don’ t want to lose a #
in their profile.
Also, there are several people just entering everything they can so it show great big numbers, THE ONLY PROBLEM IS, they are not filling out inscriptions, correct names, etc.
Hi Sam, thanks for your feedback. We’ll see what we can do about the reported problem photo requests that haven’t been removed by requesters. On one hand they serve as a history to trying to find the headstone but on the other, we can say how they can be a bit of a frustration. You can download the photo requests and not include the problem reports.
Love the new merge feature for duplicate memorials – so much better (and faster) having Find a Grave mediate the merges!
hello, have always appreciated your site 🙂 but now i can’t read anything because it’s in spanish and not english. can someone tell me how to change it so that i can continue to use your great web site.
thank you
deb luttmer
Hi Deb, happy to help! Go to the bottom of the homepage and you’ll see “Idioma: Beta Español”. Hover your mouse over the small arrow next to español. Choose English from the language menu and then click “Yes, change to English.” Feel free to contact support@findagrave.com if you need further assistance.
If I’ve created a memorial for a family member and a stranger has created a duplicate, do I get priority in the merge of the two?
Hello, if you created the first memorial in the correct cemetery then the memorial you created was first and is kept over a duplicate. If you are an immediate family member and the other manager is not an immediate family member, then contact support@findagrave.com and we’ll make sure that you manage the memorial and that there is not a duplicate. We are working on some improvements that will make managing easier for family members.