You are part of the largest international graving community in the world! We collaborate in our mission to find, record, and present information from burial records to preserve this historical record and help everyone discover more. Since 1995, when Find a Grave was created, millions of people have collaborated through Messages, Suggested Edits, adding photos and more. Over that time, there have been some members who have contributed and then left the site. In order to work together effectively, it’s important for members to know if someone who has contributed to a memorial is still active on the site. Then they can more easily connect about memorials, ask questions, and share other information.
We’re beginning a process to help the community know when a member was last active on the site. It will take some time to contact members that haven’t signed in recently. Thanks for your patience while we contact them.
If you are already signed in and using the site, Find a Grave will recognize your account as active.
Find a Grave reaches out
When a member hasn’t signed in to Find a Grave for a year, we will reach out to give them more information about signing in and share what could happen if their account is marked as inactive.
Our support team is available to help if a member is experiencing difficulties with Signing In. They can be contacted through our Contact Us page.
If the member signs in, their account will remain active. If the member doesn’t Sign In to their account (after we have contacted them and they haven’t signed in for a year), their account will be marked as inactive.
When an account is marked as inactive, here’s what will happen:
- We’ll add a note to the Profile to let other Find a Grave members know they are not currently active on the site.
- Memorials in the account will be managed by Find a Grave and could be transferred to others who would like to manage them and are willing to transfer to relatives.
- Unclaimed open photo requests will be removed.
Reactivation
An account can be reactivated by the member signing in with their email address and password. Please know that we cannot recover photo requests that were removed or management of memorials that may have been transferred to other members while a member was inactive.
If this situation comes up and a returning member would like to manage a family member’s memorial that has been transferred, they can contact the new manager using the ‘Contact Manager’ button on the Suggest Edits page and request management for that memorial. A photo request that was removed can be added again by going to the memorial and selecting ‘Request Photo.’
We know how much you rely on members being available and collaborative. We encourage all our members to sign in and keep their account active so that the Find a Grave community can work together more effectively. Thank you again for helping to fulfill the mission of the site and for your patience as we reach out to members about their member accounts.
I don’t think I’ve signed in for more than a year but I’ve been active making memorials, accepting edits, suggesting edits, etc. Are we automatically logged out after a year or will activity on our account show that we are active even though we have not actually logged in?
We’ll reach out by email if a member hasn’t been using the site or hasn’t signed in for over a year. If you are actively using the site and haven’t signed out/signed in recently, your account should still remain active.
That’s what I read into it at first. However, if you read the top portion again you will see the following sentence. “ We’re beginning a process to help the community know when a member was last active on the site. It will take some time to contact members that haven’t signed in recently.” Note it says “when a member was last active” which I understand to mean, the did something on the site and they were logged in.
Hopefully someone from Find-A-Grave might chime in and let us know. I’m there every day, 24/7/365 and if nothing else I leave flowers and look at suggested edits, both my own and any for the memorials I do manage.
I wish everyone was as diligent as you in managing their Memorials. It’s most annoying, someone they take weeks to do the edits and sometimes…NEVER.
This is an excellent initiative. I come across contributors who have made past edits where I now have a question. It will be nice to have them identified if they are inactive so I don’t waste time trying to contact them.
I hope findagrave will tell us when they have flagged the first inactive contributor … and when they have worked through what must certainly be a huge backlog.
This will certainly be of great help and take some of the frustration out of the process.
If you have been accepting edts, etc. then you are signed in. If you were not signed in, you would not be able to do any of the things you mention.
I don’t understand why it is necessary to delete the inactive member’s photo requests. It is unfortunate to delete these requests. Instead couldn’t the photo request volunteer automatically be sent a message stating the manager is active and thanking them for taking the photo???
These are for open photo requests that have not been claimed for fulfillment. If a member that requested them is marked as inactive, then the photo requests that the inactive member opened will be removed.
It would be nice if the individual who is responsible for an individuals memorial could close a photo request as well. I have a family member who does not have a headstone. I’ve been contacted by the same person more than once requesting a grave photo. I mentioned to them there’s no headstone and they said veterans should have them. However he doesn’t so this request just sits pending.
Thanks for your feedback and suggestion. We’ll send this on for review. A photo volunteer could take a picture of the grave location and surrounding area to fulfill the photo request.
If I understand this correctly, when a photo request is submitted nobody else can submit one. If the person requesting the photo is inactive for a year or more, removing that request will allow other members to submit a new request, thus notifying any new volunteers one has been made.
I am glad of your mail today, very timely, because I need advice and counsel to set up records here in New Brunswick. The appears to possibly be on public land, or private land, one or the other There are several gravestones in the 1930.s and 1940’s, No identification seems in view, on a trail leading in the forest for poss 1500 hundred feet or more.
The title of the burials states Midland Road Cemetery, on Midland Road, Queens Co. New Brunswick. One family drew me to this spot because of the records, the Toussaint family. The family name is French from Belgium. For years I heard the family name was Toussang, a terrible spelling and pronouncement of a name meaning All Saints. Someone is willing to take take pictures, and even erect wooden signs to complete the registration. Help please! Erle
Thanks for reaching out. Please search the site and see if the cemetery has been added. If not, you can add the cemetery and then add the memorials to it. Please visit our support site for more information about adding cemeteries and memorials. You can also contact our support team here.
Why are you doing this. What is the purpose of openly letting people know who has/is using Find a Grave. I just don’t understand. Seems rather crazy to me.
This will allow members to more easily connect, ask questions, and share information on Find a Grave.
I too, would be interested in knowing when a graver has fallen. I have set unanswered text messages to managers and Edits which ultimately get automatically accepted by Find a Grave. Neither of those situations tell me if/when a graver is no longer active or has fallen.
It also would be very helpful to know how many memorials a manager can identify their relationship to. So far, Find a Grave considers that to be secret information. I manage memorials for several close relatives that I am not permitted to identify my relationship to. I do not understand why I cannot identify my relationship. No one else can enter a relationship to a memorial which I manage.
On the face of it, this seems to be a good improvement. I have made several requests over the years to have photo requests removed only to be told the original requester had to delete the request.
When I first began devoting my time to Find-A-Grave a few yerars back, I would print a list of photo requests for local cemeteries, then go visit them. One cemetery has over 14,000 burials. Not a one of the photo requests for that cemetery had any information other than the request itself. When I clicked on the requester’s name, I received a notification that the member’s profile “was no longer available”, so I could not ask for more specific information. I will be glad to see those requests disappear…
There are memorials (e.g. 21085270 ) which are managed by Find a Grave but cannot be claimed because they have pending edits. Shouldn’t part of the process of transferring a memorial to Find a Grave also be to auto-accept all pending edits…since that is going to happen anyway after (less than) 21 days.
In this instance, the spouse edit came through as a suggested edit on the other spouse’s memorial. So, that will need to be processed before the memorial can be requested.
100% in favor of this. Well done by the folks at Find A Grave.
I also am in favor of this, and so glad to hear it. I have many family members in a cemetery in Delaware and the memorial manager of thousands of graves in this cemetery has clearly been inactive for some years and is not allowing email communication. I would be SO glad to take over so many of these memorials without have to plead with FindaGrave for each one.
I have provided my login credentials for my daughter in case of… Is one not given a designated person the chance to assume the account?
Hi Carol, thanks for your question. Here is a link to instructions for adding a steward for the memorials you manage.
Collaboration does not occur when people are allowed to not allow messages from other members. If someone doesn’t want messages than maybe they shouldn’t be managers.
I agree 100 %.
I have previously made suggestions that those memorial “managers” that have their profiles marked as “Not Accepting Messages” should:
1. Not have the ability to Decline suggested edits; Approve and Modify is alright, with “Modify” requiring a note explaining the modification sent to the contributor;
2. Not be permitted to send messsages whatsoever;
3. Not be permitted to send suggested edits;
4. Forfeit any memorial for which they ignore suggested edits to the contributor that made the suggestion. If the contributor doesn’t want management, it can be transfered to Find-A-Grave (member #8) and made available to any manager other than the one that just lost it.
One a related topic, there is one manager in particular that has repeatedly declined my suggested edits because it either conflicts with information they have (but their information is a blank field), or it does not match exactly the present infomation. For example: In Northern Virginia, Fairfax hospital is physically located in West Falls Church, Fairfax County, Va. This “manager” declines all of my edits if I suggest “Falls Church” (without the “West”) instead of modifying the edit to suit his whims. This is particularly galling when the deceased’s death cert shows just Falls Church.
I appreciate this new initiative because sometimes I literally have hundreds of edits not being approved for 3 weeks. It discourages me from making further edits with such a long wait time, Thank you Find a Grave for trying to make the website more collaborative.
I agree that it is helpful to try to identify and ensure that records are managed by people who are still active.
My main concern however is what is meant by “transfer records to others who would like to manage them”
You might have a feeding frenzy of people who want to snatch up all of an inactive manager’s records. (I admit that – in the case of one manager who has not created a record in 5 years, who lets all edits go to auto accept and who may or may not be active – I would be hovering and waiting for the opportunity to acquire at least several dozen of the 14,000 records they manage)
I’ve encountered a few such situations where certain persons have acquired a large number of records but do not actively manage them
In one case I and another person were slowly taking control of the records in one Cemetery as I made edits based on photos I added and she made edits based on original bios she was writing from obituaries. Then suddenly one day we discovered that a person who already managed a couple hundred thousand records had come in and acquired all 4,000 remaining records and everything now had to go through the auto accept process. The other person became so frustrated she simply stopped contributing
Personally, I only seek the transfer of a Find a Grave managed record when I’m actually in the process of making an edit to it. But I know there are some who actively seek out and try to acquire such records.
So you might end up swapping out an inactive manager for a manager who is active on the system but does not actively manage individual records, possibly because they have so many of them
I’m not sure what the solution is. Maybe in cases of records from inactive managers you have a strict overall limit on the number that can be acquired by any one individual. I would prefer to see management spread around among several people who have a specific interest in those persons or in that particular cemetery rather than having a small number of the same people building up the number of records they control
Thank you for your comments and thank you for your work on the site. We appreciate your concerns. We have guidelines for managers on our support site and have a limit regarding requesting transfers of memorials managed by Find a Grave. You can learn more about that here.
The solution is to end the 3 week wait period altogether. Allow all suggested edits to post but with a message sent to the manager that a memorial was edited. The manager can then review the edit and if he/she feels the edit was in error, can reject the edit and the one who suggested the edit would be notified with an explanation as to why the edit is being rejected. A rejected edit would revert to the previous status.
Those who make edits should not have to suffer the frustration of waiting 3 weeks for an edit to post because the manager is either inactive or is overwhelmed by taking on too many memorials that they can’t manage properly.
A manager should not have to forfeit the current allowed three weeks for research and verification of submitted edits just because someone else is impatient. Three weeks is not very long, but it is long enough to research and prevent automatic acceptance of many incorrect edits. Thank you to the admins for allowing three weeks for edit checking!!!
In response to the email from Laura Young if the person (Your family member) was a veteran than what you need to do to get them a headstone is to find or get his DD-214 and take it to the cemetery where he is buried and they will help you fill it out and get him the headstone that he deserves and has earned.
I’ve spoken to his family in the past. Unfortunately they do not want to proceed with it.
I think this an excellent idea. I hope this alleviates the frustration from making suggested edits and having to wait the full three weeks for them to post. About 90 % of my suggestions are not accepted by the manager and are instead automatically accepted after the 3 week waiting period has expired. Many of these memorials are from people who “manage” over 100 000 memorials and I highly doubt they are doing any research to verify my edits. I hope by weeding out inactive “managers”, edits will process much faster.
I think this is a great initiative and will be a better user experience for those of us who submit large numbers of edits.
Has the Find a Grave Team considered auto approving edits that are submitted to memorials where the memorial manager has not approved or declined any edit in more than a year? There is a memorial manager in my area that has not approved or declined my submitted edits for the past 3 years, but the memorial manager is adding memorials weekly.