Member-only story
How Ancestry.com’s Find A Grave Encourages Bad Actors and Bad Data
By gamifying memorials, FindAGrave.com became a Wild West for chronicling the dead
My grandma died in April of 2004 at the age of 85, and what remains of her today are vestiges of a life lived entirely offline — the typewritten letters she’d mail to me six or seven times a year; the gold wedding ring I wore when I married my husband; the oak grandfather clock that chimes every quarter hour in my parents’ living room in Maryland.
In death, though, my grandma is more online than ever. A few months ago, my sister stumbled across a page created for my grandmother on the website FindAGrave.com. It wasn’t immediately clear what she’d uncovered. A death profile of some sort, the postmortem equivalent of a page on Facebook? Some of the details listed were familiar to me — the places of her birth and death, her husband’s name. Others were a revelation — her wedding anniversary, her mother’s maiden name, the year her sister was born. Four photos adorned the page: two of her headstone, and two of her as a child, the latter of which my mom can’t recall ever seeing before.
The information on my grandmother’s page was accurate, but I had no idea where it had come from. Each Find A Grave memorial links to the user who created it, so I started…
