Revisiting

 Dennis Bentley

This past weekend we were smiled upon by the weather daemons.  Sunny to partly cloudy, highs in the low 50s. For a Missouri February, not too shabby. In the early 1980s when I was an airman stationed in northern Japan, sunshine on any day and 50+ degrees meant shorts, flip-flops and Frisbees.
I’m a bit older now, not that you would notice.
I left the house before 9:00 again, camera in hand.
First and foremost, Danby Cemetery south of Festus.  I’d had a couple of requests pop up for that cemetery and upon review of my personal collection, discovered that it had been 10 years since my last visit. My, the time sure does fly by, doesn’t it?
Since, unlike about half the cemeteries I’ve visited in the past that were historic, disused, abandoned, plowed over, Danby was still ‘active’, open for new burials. I’d need to do some catching up.
Arriving there, I only vaguely recalled it.
Danby cemetery is on the grounds of the old Danby Methodist Church. There is no longer a church

Danby, June 2013

there, there hasn’t been in many years. A small community still exists though.
Since the cemetery is orderly, pretty much a rectangular grid, I had the notion to ‘mow the rows.’
Mowing the rows, a term I’ve mentioned before, means to start at one corner and step from one headstone to the next until reaching the opposite corner, photographing all the headstones rather than hunting and pecking.
Sure, many of these photographs would turn out to be duplicates of those I took on my last trip, but what this method lacks in redundancy elimination it makes up for in physical efficiency. I had an estimated 719 photographs available on the SD memory card in my camera, another 400 or so on the spare on the strap. According to Findagrave, this cemetery only had just over 220 headstones.
I could sort them out later, at my leisure.
I made special note of those graves that had been dug since my last trip. A lot of them.
It only took an hour or so.

    A complicating factor: The back 3 or 4 rows were separated from the larger field by a foot high pole-fence/divider. Hmmm. Still easily accessible, open to the general public, but markedly separated.
There were several old, very old (by midwest U.S. standards) headstones, a few too eroded or broken to be decipherable. A true cemeterian would investigate these further, shaving cream, charcoal etching, restoration. . . that’s just not me. I only do what I do.
The oldest remaining/legible headstone in Jefferson County is dated 1832. I have seen it, I have held it, I have photographed it.  (more on this in a later article).
Many of the ‘old’ stones at this place were at least a generation newer than that one, 1870s or so.

I let my mind go blank for the duration, concentrating only on framing, shadow, reflection, etc. This was very much mechanical, robotic, peaceful, refreshing.
Though the photo-tour took little more than an hour, the real dark secret of this peculiar hobby is the post-photoshoot manual labor. I spent the majority of the afternoon, into early evening on Saturday, updating the Findagrave site.
The Boring Technical Stuff:
Findagrave doesn’t know about anyone until someone enters the information. There is no magical master data connection at Findagrave. ALL information/data is entered by volunteers.
In order to voluntarily upload and post my photos, a ‘memorial’ must exist for that person. That memorial is part of the data that volunteers must enter.  And if no volunteer has entered that data? If a memorial for one of my photos does not exist yet?
If you review my Findagrave profile you will see that I’ve ‘added’ over 1100 memorials and ‘manage’ just a few fewer than that.  

     When I come across a photo for which there is no memorial, I punch the ‘create memorial’ button and type in the information, which is only all the relevant data I can glean from the headstone photo and only occasionally a bit more.
Unless the person died recently, in the last three or four months Findagrave will let me do that without a challenge, without further verification, even if the information provided is erroneous.
   Erroneous information happens ten to fifteen percent (anecdotal estimate) of the time. Sometimes this is just because of typos. Misspellings, etc. Sometimes a volunteering is just guessing.
There are Findagrave volunteers that do not actually photograph anything. I have come across a few that are working entirely from archived death certificates or published obituaries.  They are often creating memorials based on only the (almost always) incomplete data in front of them.
Oh, about that “three or four month” thing.  This is a relatively recent upgrade for Findagrave that came about based on complaints from family members.
As with nearly every online pursuit, there are people involved in crowdsourcing that see it as a competition of some kind. A ‘points’ driven pursuit.  Thus they are motivated to get up early and enter data as soon as it becomes available, as much as they can. Even if this means reading obits and death notices and creating (owning) memorials before the poor soul’s funeral.  Some family members were upset about this, there was, for a few years, several heated discussions about this very thing within the several Findagrave social media communities. People that create memorials immediately become the ‘owners’ of that memorial. All suggested edits must be approved by the memorial owner. Thus if a

bereaved family member wanted to correct the memorial they had to hit the ‘suggest edit’ button and then wait, wait, wait for the owner to approve it.  Too often the owners would let these suggested edits pile up, a nuisance task, since they had no real vested interest in any particular memorial after creation.
Thus the recent change. It’s still not fact checked, but within the first few months of a death, a person must state that they are indeed a family member on the site before they are allowed to create a memorial. IMHO that’s a vast improvement.
I do not want to ‘own’ the 1000+ memorials I have created, it is simply the way the site works. I have never, in my recollection, refused an ownership transfer request, though I am seldom asked for one. I do not need to ask for reasons for the transfer request, the request itself usually contains a valid enough explanation.
Before this was policy, back in 2013, I made sure to create a memorial for my own father before I headed down to Kentucky for his funeral. 
So the task is this. Open a photo, open the site, check for a memorial (mind your spelling) and, depending on the status of the memorial, if it exists at all, add the photo or an edited version of it. Back 12 years ago I only had incredibly slow internet, dialup maybe, and I batch-‘reduced’ the photos using editing software about 80% before uploading. My camera is capable of taking really, really nice, high resolution photos. The Findagrave web site is not expecting, nor in every day use will it ever be, hosting billboard or magazine quality pictures. This isn’t porn or celebrity exposé, or Google Earth. No one will be reasonably expecting mega-resolution.
I have the hi-res originals on file. I’m an IT guy, I have the drive space.
Occasionally I find a memorial needs to be created but the photo I took obscures part of the needed data. In this case and only in a few other cases, do I look up an actual obituary to fill in the blanks. I do not rely on any particular site for this, usually just Google-ing “John Smith, Missouri obit” will get me there.  I try not to be too specific at first, I leave out middle names/initials, town names, etc.  I then cross-compare what I do know with the obituary information. This is pretty much the extent of my investigative effort.
It takes about four or five minutes per photo/memorial. Individual photo editing, cropping, adjustments to the alignment, brightness, etc. add several minutes to this process. (this is why I work so hard to ‘frame’ the photos on-site)  These minutes pile up in a hurry. I can easily lose track of vast amounts of time just sitting there updating the site. I don’t particularly enjoy data entry, nor do I claim any expertise at it. It’s just a necessary obstacle, a time-killer.
Wait! There’s more!
About Danby. I mentioned earlier that the back rows were separated by a foot-tall pole/rail fence

though readily accessible.  This brings up another aspect of this website-specific hobby.
At one end of the separated section there was a marker, a headstone thing. Etched into that stone it was mentioned that this section was now, in fact, a separate cemetery, “Holst” by name. It wasn’t there in my earlier visits though it contained some headstones that did actually exist back then.
During my upload cycle that afternoon I checked. Findagrave did not have a cemetery by that name. I checked, the burials I found in that section were indeed listed in the Danby cemetery, exclusively. I don’t know when, how, or why the Holst cemetery was separated from Danby, nor do I really care. But for sake of data accuracy, I went about the necessary steps to create a new cemetery in Findagrave.
Anyone can do this. I’ve actually done this before.
About twelve years ago, back in the early days of Findagrave, there were a LOT of unlisted cemeteries. I stumbled across one in Jefferson County, Ligouri cemetery in the eastern portion of the county. 300+ burials in a very Catholic cemetery. Back then I created that cemetery in Findagrave, took a photo of the entrance sign, posted it, then mowed the rows to populate it. I’ve written about this before (here).
Now there’s the matter of ‘transferring’ those headstones from the Danby cemetery to Holst.
I’m not doing that.
To do so would require that I request from each of the existing memorial owners (remember them?) a transfer from Danby to Holst. . .  individually. I only ‘own’ about 10% of the Danby memorials myself.
Instead, in the Holst Cemetery description, I noted that it was directly adjacent to Danby and that most of the burials were already listed there.  Good enough for me. For now.

Virtual Cemeteries
Speaking of creating cemeteries, Findagrave has a little advertised, though amazing, feature. “Virtual” cemeteries.

The idea is this. Say you worked for a certain manufacturing facility for a number of years, in a town other than the one you currently reside. Now you find out that many of the people you worked with are passing away. A virtual cemetery allows you to build a list of these burials, wherever they are in the world, as a group. It does not break the current cemetery location, it merely adds a link to that existing memorial.
This can be done for families as well, any grouping, even multiple groupings are valid. Use your imagination.

Enough for now, more later, I haven’t even started on the two cemeteries I visited on Sunday.