Does this couple in Missouri own your relatives on Find a Grave, too?

Finding this was accidental, I swear!

One of my favorite actors is David Tennant, and during an interview he once told the story of a man who asked him for his autograph... in the shower. David Tennant signed the autograph simply to get back to what was left of his shower in peace, but not before making a point I have always remembered.

If you have to explain to someone why their behavior is inappropriate, are they really going to understand it?

Nevertheless, I'm going to go ahead with what I'm hoping can be a moment of constructive reflection for everyone who reads this. And if you're guilty of anything like what I'm about to describe, I want you to take an honest look at yourself. Realize that you are no different than the guy asking for someone's autograph while they're in the shower, and you simply don't know it yet.

A Disturbing Discovery

My husband's father just passed away, and we returned to our neighboring hometowns to visit with family and participate in the funeral. We are both genealogists, and we take what we do seriously. In the grand southern tradition from whence we both descend, we didn't bat an eye at taking a picture of the body in the casket. I made sure I got two shots of the pall bearers, so we could see all six of them. I kept extra programs and funeral cards. Suffice it to say, we need no assistance when it comes to remembering our dead.

His funeral was on Monday. I asked my husband if he wanted me to create the Find a Grave memorial on Tuesday. I created it on Wednesday after we arrived home--only to discover that one had already been created for him last week.

I couldn't believe it. I showed the memorial to my husband. He told me he didn't like the picture, and I recognized it instantly as the one his mother had given to the newspaper. He didn't need to tell me. I watched him tear our house apart looking for the perfect pictures to bring to the funeral. I watched him edit family photos for more than two hours to bring as a perfect offering of his father's memory.

I had to be the one to tell him that his father's memorial page was owned by Lyle & Marsha, a couple in Missouri he has never met. I watched the anger spell out in unspoken words across his face, as it dawned on him that total strangers had taken one of his father's most public memorials away from his family. I had to explain that we would have to ask them--ask them!--to transfer the memorial to us, and they would be under no obligation to cooperate. As his wife, I saw his anger smolder into quiet disgust with the human race. It was the last thing on earth I wanted him to feel after losing his father.

Upon closer inspection, I discovered that Lyle and Marsha created the memorial with the information published online in my father-in-law's obituary. Someone else then came along with the copied image from the newspaper, and added it to the memorial. The obituary is posted in its entirety on the memorial, which I have never liked for aesthetic reasons. The end result is a memorial that neither of us had any control over, and is in no way what we would have wanted. Which is ironic, given that Lyle and Marsha's stated goal is to "present a memorial that will please the family."

I would ask how they could ever hope to do that, given that they don't even know us. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Why should this couple be allowed to create memorials for people based on what is printed in obituaries, before the body is even buried? From a genealogical standpoint, this is unadulterated sloppiness on their part. How can they know what was printed in the obituary was accurate? I have half a dozen obituaries that have incorrect burial information on them, and I shudder to think what someone like Lyle and Marsha could have done with them.

How many memorials have they created with false information on them--simply because they have never met the family, they do not live in the area, and have no clue what they're talking about?

And more to the point, the last time I checked the website was called Find a Grave--not Find an Obituary.

So who are Lyle and Marsha?

I've been watching this couple very closely. I've watched their number of memorials created/managed continue to skyrocket. Find a Grave publishes their user statistics on their public profile. In 3 years, 11 months, and 3 days they have created 71,106 memorials. That's roughly 18,186 a year, more than 1,500 a month. This translates into 50 memorials created each day.

I want to draw attention to a few elements of their public Find a Grave contributor profile. They reveal so much more about themselves through their own words than I could ever hope to do with mine.

"If we have done a memorial for one of your loved ones, feel free to request their memorial. However, we transfer according to FAG guidelines. Please be kind when requesting. We will not reply to hateful, demanding requests. This is a hobby that we enjoy, and we will not allow anyone to add stress or aggravation to something we enjoy."

Clearly, Lyle and Marsha have been this intrusive, offensive, and disrespectful to other people's grief before. It isn't in the nature of sane, rational people to be angry with strangers. If this is an experience they find themselves having frequently, it means they're doing something that needs to be corrected. The appropriate response is NOT to minimize the the feelings of people they've hurt by accusing them of being "hateful" or "demanding." By saying they refuse to feel "stress or aggravation" over the pain they cause, they're pretending like they've done nothing wrong. They're saying their feelings matter, and those of others simply do not.

They demand respect, but they give none.

Let's talk for a minute about the Find a Grave guidelines they say they strive to uphold. This is the policy Find a Grave follows in these disputes over memorials.

If the memorial in question is a direct relative within four generations (siblings, parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents) to you and the original submitter is not direct family, then they must transfer the memorial. If they refuse to transfer your relative to you, contactinfo@findagrave.com and we will work on it for you.

Lyle and Marsha are not direct relatives of my father-in-law. According to the guidelines, they are required to transfer the memorial to me and my husband. Seeing as they manage almost 80,000 profiles, I don't see them getting around to my transfer request any time soon. Maybe they'd have a little more time for courtesy if they weren't trying to inflate their statistics fake internet points so aggressively. So I've already escalated the matter to Find a Grave. They've transferred my case over to their partners at Ancestry.com, and I'm *in the process of working together with them to have the memorial deleted.

By putting us into a situation where we have to reach out to them, on their terms, Lyle and Marsha intruded on our peace of mind. They are no less oblivious and selfish than David Tennant's naked autograph seeker. They could not have imposed on us more--even if they showed up to our hotel room, walked in on my husband in the shower, and asked for his autograph. The result is identical. To invade on someone's private, vulnerable space, for the sake of a record that doesn't even belong to them--that's what they've done to our family. Whether they will acknowledge their wrong or not, that is how they have made us feel.

While there is no law or user agreement that may forbid what they're doing, it's certainly against common sense and basic human decency. If nothing else, I hope they will ponder on the immense joy they clearly feel using Find a Grave, and recognize that they have taken that away from my husband. That may be the only way for them to comprehend their actions, because reason and user agreements certainly cannot help them.

What I Have Learned

Because of this entire situation, I've come up with some personal guidelines for how I'm going to create Find a Grave memorials from now on. I went through all of my created profiles and saw I had the presence of mind never to do any of these things. But I will still treat them as my personal policy from now on.

I will not create profiles for adults who have been deceased less than a year. For infants, children, and minors, I will not create a memorial until they have been deceased at least five years. I want to give ample time for families to grieve, and hopefully create the memorial themselves.

Wherever possible, I will not create memorials for my family based solely on information provided from obituaries or death records. I will find the testimony of someone who has been to the cemetery, seen or photographed the headstone, was present for the funeral, or visit the grave myself before creating the memorial. 

Any memorial I create for someone else's family will be from a visit I made to a cemetery, not from printed records. 

If an obituary names living people, I will not post it to a memorial. Just because someone's name was included in an obituary does not mean they want their names associated with the deceased. While this wasn't the case with my father-in-law, it definitely was with my own father. Some people are also concerned for their privacy, and it's no one's place but theirs to decide how their name is used on the internet.

I will not withhold memorials from living family members for any reason.  

I will remove a memorial if they ask me to do so, without argument or requiring an explanation.

I will respond to any requests made of me by living family within 24 hours, wherever possible.  

I will not copy photos from other websites to publish to Find a Grave, unless I have permission or they are public domain images.

Have you had any crazy experiences with Find a Grave volunteers? What are your personal policies on how you contribute to Find a Grave? Let us know in comments!



*UPDATE: Thanks to the fine folks at Find a Grave/Ancestry.com, Lyle and Marsha's memorial has been deleted. I said on Twitter this morning that Find a Grave staff are so awesome, they deserve costumes and a theme song. This was what immediately came to mind...

When Marsha and Lyle
tryna cramp yo' style
Who you gonna call?
 Find a Grave!

When they swipe yo' dad
 Make you really mad
 Who you gonna call?
Find a Grave!

Close Up: Pearl Bartlett Doyle

Photo of Pearl May Bartlett Doyle, ca. 1925-1966; owned by Heather Collins, Boise, Idaho, 2015. [Previously owned by Emily Doyle, wife of Raymond Richard Doyle]

Freemasonry Records for Genealogy

Because Freemasonry is one of the oldest fraternal organizations still in existence, odds are good that you'll come across someone in your family who was a Freemason. The next question that immediately comes to mind for someone who is a genealogist is what kinds of records do Freemasons keep of their members, and can I access them?

Records of membership, if they were kept at all, were recorded in the person's home lodge. What the lodge chose to do with those records is as wide and varied as the interests of the individuals in the lodge. There may be scrapbooks, journals, ledgers, histories--or there may be nothing at all. Depending upon how recently the person was a participating member in the lodge will also determine what you find.

The challenge then, is two-fold: finding the person's lodge, and figuring out what sort of records were kept at the time he was a member there. Sometimes lodges are reorganized as their numbers fluctuate, so the people who currently attend the lodge may not be able to tell you where the records of an older lodge are kept. Finding anything in detail about a Freemason ancestor is mostly a question of luck and persistence.

So now that I share the mother-load of all Freemasonry hauls, know that I simply got lucky.

Where to Begin? Finding the Proceedings

Freemasons publish a set of records for their local lodges every year. The lodges submit a summary of their leadership to their Grand Lodge, who then publishes them in a sort of annual almanac. Their "Return" includes the officers, the past Master Masons who attended that lodge, and some basic information about when the lodge was formed and when it met. If your ancestor was an officer or a Master Mason, their names will appear on these Returns for each year they actively attended their lodge.

These books of records from the Grand Lodges throughout the world can often be found in various libraries. You can use WorldCat.org to locate them. They can also be available online in places like Google Books, which is where I found the ones I used. They're usually titled Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons of Nova Scotia, or whatever the location may be. Determining the jurisdiction/Grand Lodge which would have serviced your ancestor, therefore, is important--especially since it doesn't always follow obvious geography. For example, the Grand Lodge over east Tennessee for quite some time was actually based in North Carolina.

The Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia, Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons of Nova Scotia (1897), p. 123; digital images, Google Books (https://books.google.com/books?id=7-sqAAAAMAAJ : accessed 5 Jan 2015).

Not that I gave that any thought when I found these records. It was the pure power of the search engine which pointed me to Charles Pinheiro on these lists. Simply inputting his name with combinations of Union Lodge, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Masons produced several results of interest on Google Books.

In 1897, Charles Henry Pinheiro was a Senior Deacon in the Union Lodge. Note that officers were elected for annual terms, and it could be common for the lower-ranking officers to shuffle around quite a bit, especially in a lodge that wasn't stable. You can gain a lot of insight into the lodges your ancestor belonged to by reading the information recorded in these books.

You can also find other family members, since being a Freemason was often a family tradition. Note that on the 1897 list, one of the Past Masters is William T. Bailey, Charles' brother-in-law.

Learning something about the officers and their responsibilities will reveal how they spent their time in the Lodge, and who their friends were.

Upon winning an election for a position, a symbolic jewel was given to the officer to set them apart from other members. The Senior Deacon's jewel was the square and compass, with a Sun in the middle. His responsibilities included being a messenger for the Worshipful Master, escorting new initiates and visitors, and playing several different roles in Masonic ceremonies. The exact details of some rituals may not be available because as part of their membership, Freemasons vow not to reveal certain details of what they do.

The Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia, Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons of Nova Scotia (1898), p. 129; digital images, Google Books (https://books.google.com/books?id=7-sqAAAAMAAJ : accessed 5 Jan 2015).

As long as Charles continues to be re-elected, I will have a record of his presence in the Lodge, and by extension his location in time. Understanding the circumstances and climate of the Lodge can be valuable, because it can reveal the nature of some of the changes you see from year to year. The purpose of this book was to let other Freemasons in the Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia know how each local lodge was doing. They have brief descriptions about the challenges and successes that each lodge faces. Some limited detail was also given about lodges from around the world, so it may be valuable to look at a book from a similar time period as your ancestor, even if it's published from a different Grand Lodge than your ancestor's lodge.

Get Familiar with the Lodge's Past

One particular challenge for the Union Lodge revealed in the text was a lack of stability in attendance, even among the leadership. The attendance dropped off so heavily among the more seasoned members that the lodge didn't have enough people to perform the rituals and essential functions. Such was the case in 1896 when William T. Bailey was Worshipful Master. Attendance was so low, they did not appoint a Junior Steward.

This difficulty continued throughout the next several years, until of Union Lodge, no. 18 it was said in Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Canada, 1903, page lvii:

"This Lodge (which you all know is composed entirely of colored brethren), has been for a long time in a most deplorable condition, many of its older and better informed members having either retired or absented themselves from the Lodge, leaving its management under the control of members nearly all of of whom are quite incapable of conducting its affairs in a satisfactory manner, hence its gradual decadence, until it is now unable to get a sufficient number to attend to open Lodge."

One of the reasons for this (rather abrupt) assessment stemmed from the financial burden for men who could not pay their dues. Those who did not pay their dues could not be officers, and likely did not want to be reminded of the fact. From Judith Fingard's From Sea to Rail: Black Transportation Workers and Their Families in Halifax c. 1870-1916, we can confirm that finances were at the root of the Union Lodge's struggles.

"In March 1898, for example, a major controversy occurred over the employment policies of the Intercolonial Railway. The perceived redundancy of sleeping car porters on the Maritime express, operating between Halifax and Montreal during the slack season, resulted in the dismissal or demotion of seven black porters, six of whom, including James Daniels, were domiciled in Halifax. Their duties were added to those of the white conductors. Two other Halifax men, employed as assistant cooks, one of whom was Charles Pinheiro, were also affected. All eight Halifax men were freemasons." (emphasis added)

The Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia, Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons of Nova Scotia (1907), p. 155; digital images, Google Books (https://books.google.com/books?id=TDkwAQAAMAAJ : accessed 5 Jan 2015).

The gap in the books available to me right now means I have no insight into the Union Lodge between 1898 to 1905. Google Books has copies of the 1905 Proceedings, but Charles does not appear. He was likely unemployed or underemployed throughout this entire period.

He reappears in the Proceedings of 1907 and 1911, where Charles Pinheiro is listed as Senior Steward and Junior Steward, respectively. Those positions were appointed, not elected. He was primarily responsible for assisting the Wardens and overseeing the kitchen. Seeing as Charles was employed as a cook several times throughout his life, he must have been a good one to be given such an appointment.

It also makes me wonder if they appointed him because they decided they would rather have him there without his dues than to have him stay away. Seeing as he went from Senior Steward to Junior Steward, I could see that being the case.

As a Steward, he would have born one of the matching Stewards Jewels. The cornucopia, or "horn of plenty" has an obvious connection to the preparation and enjoyment of food. Although it could have been seen as a lowly position, unlike other leadership his efforts would have been more sincerely received (and praised) for a job well-done. The need for, and appreciation of, good food transcends any kind of social status.

I learned from the Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia's website that Union Lodge, no. 18 no longer exists. Knowing that I can never see the fruit of Charles Pinheiro's labors, a modern continuation of what he tried to build, is disheartening. But because of that, I feel even more fortunate that his name was remembered in these books. Without them, I would never have known what role freemasonry played in his life.

There are literally dozens of Proceedings from various states, countries, and time periods on Google Books. If you are looking to discover something about your ancestors and their links to freemasonry, it is an excellent place to start.

Genetic Genealogy for Beginners, Part 1

As many of you recall, I took the AncestryDNA test a while back and I'm still trying to make it work for me as much as possible. I said I was going to follow up on the experiences I've been having at GEDmatch.com, which so far has been a great experience for me. Although I still haven't made any amazing discoveries in terms of matches, I'm well on my way to making that happen.

The more I've learned about genetics, the more I realize that I needed someone to explain the important fundamentals to me--information that, in my experience, is not easy to find.

Because of that, I've decided to make a video series on the basics of genetic genealogy. Be sure to Like, Comment, Subscribe, and Share!

If you're thinking about taking a DNA test, regardless of the company you test with, there are some important things you need to know. I cover these in my Part 1 video in more detail, but here are some of the facts you most need to understand before (or after) buying a test.

1. You need to start with at least two tests, one for you and one for another person in your family. Why? Because DNA does not come pre-color coded according to what came from your mom or dad. If you want to have any clue at all about which side of the family your cousin matches come from, you need to know which parts of your DNA are maternal and paternal. Have one of your parents tested with you. If that's not possible, try another close relative (grandparents, cousins, anyone who can clearly comes from one side of your family.)
2. If you think a cM is a centimeter, or a SNP (pronounced "snip") is a haircut, you're in a lot of trouble. These are the two most important concepts in measuring how someone is related to you. Never heard of 'em before? Check out my video above to get started.
3. There is no royal road to cousin matching. You have to learn science, do calculations, and study up on what it all means to do genetic genealogy. You have to learn about your matching tools and how to use them. Your testing companies may match you to other people, but until you know how it all works it's all going to be Greek to you. If you want to solve your family mysteries, it doesn't just happen like a shaky leaf hint. It takes work. If you don't want to invest the time to learn and collaborate with other people, genetic genealogy is not for you.

And as a final piece of advice: start a new tree and get rid of the privacy settings. Your test alone isn't going to tell you very much. You have to work together with other people, comparing notes with them and trying to figure out how the two of you are related. They can't help you if they can't see your tree or communicate with you. And while you're creating a second tree, try to forget everything you thought you knew about your family. Follow the biological lines as far as you can. Don't put in step parents or adopted parents anywhere in that tree. It will only make your life--and the lives of those who want to help you--more difficult.

Have any questions about where to get started? Leave them in comments and I'll answer them as I continue to genetic genealogy series!

UPDATE: Part 2 and Part 3 are available now!