There’s nothing quite like getting an email letting you know that a Find a Grave photo volunteer fulfilled your photo request and now you can go to the site and see the gravestone of your family member or someone you are researching. Photo volunteers are one of the things that make Find a Grave such a wonderful community to be part of. They give their time and knowledge of an area to help others who are looking for a gravestone image, but live too far away or can’t get to the graveyard themselves. If you’ve never heard of photo volunteering, you can learn more here. We love our photo volunteers and thank them for all their efforts.
In the past, photo volunteers set the location where they could volunteer by entering a zip code or placing a pin on a map and then choosing how far from that place they could go. That’s worked pretty well, but we often hear from people who would like to volunteer for a specific cemetery or we hear complaints that not all the cemeteries included within the radius they have chosen make sense.
With that feedback in mind, we’ve been working on some changes that we hope will help make the photo volunteer experience even better. We’ve updated the site so that you can choose which cemeteries you will take pictures in.
Now, when you register with the site or choose to be a photo volunteer, you can provide a city or county or use your current location and we’ll find the cemeteries in that area and you can add them to the list of cemeteries you volunteer in. For those of you who are already photo volunteers, we’ve added the cemeteries within the radius of your old location to your list. You can always add or remove cemeteries from that list in the Photo Volunteer section of your Account.
The main places you’ll see this change are when you register, on the cemetery page, in your account and on the photo requests page.
Registration:
When you register for the site, you have the option to become a photo volunteer. When you do, we’ll ask you for a location and then automatically add the cemeteries in that location to your list of volunteer cemeteries. You can see the cemeteries we’ve added using the “View list” link. From there you can remove any cemeteries you don’t want to include.
Cemetery Page:
You can add or remove an individual cemetery from your volunteer list by going to that cemetery’s page and either selecting the “Volunteer” button to volunteer there or, if you are already a volunteer and would like to stop volunteering there, select the “Volunteering” button (this will change to “Unvolunteer” when your cursor is over it).
Account Page:
To see and update the list of cemeteries where you volunteer, visit the Photo Volunteer section of the Account page. There you can become a photo volunteer if you aren’t already or stop volunteering if you need to. You’ll also see a list of cemeteries where you are a volunteer and you can select the “Unvolunteer” x to stop volunteering there or use the “Add a Cemetery” button to find more cemeteries where you can volunteer. Once you select “Add a cemetery,” you can type in a city or county name or use your current location to see a list of cemeteries in that area that where you can volunteer. Select “Volunteer” to add all the cemeteries in the list or uncheck those you don’t want and then select “Volunteer” to add only those you have left checked.
Sometimes a member will contact us to say they are moving and can no longer volunteer in their old location so they would like us to update that for them. You can always make those updates yourself in the Photo Volunteer area. Just clear your old selections using the “Unvolunteer from all” option and then enter your new location to find cemeteries in your new area.
Photo Requests Page:
The Photo Requests page is a place to find new photo requests you can work on. By default the page will show open requests, with no problems reported, in cemeteries where you have chosen to volunteer. You can also see requests from a specific cemetery, other locations, or from a particular Find a Grave member. On the Photo Requests page you’ll also see a tab for requests you have claimed and requests you have made.
We are excited for this change and hope it will be a real help for those who give so generously of their time and help make Find a Grave the wonderful collaborative community that it is. Give it a try and send us your feedback to let us know what you think and how we can make it better.