Findagrave.com: from Good to Great to Incredible!

As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to spend some time discussing findagrave.com today.  This is a free site, first created to post celebrity and famous people’s grave sites, and now an extremely helpful site for genealogy.

I first started posting grave site photos, portraits, and memorials for my ancestors over ten years ago. Here’s an example with my Great Grandfather: David Davison.

I was motivated by the desire to share freely the information I had found or that others had shared with me. For years I’ve used it as my virtual cemetery where I could pay my respects any time of the year. Once you’ve registered, you can create online virtual cemeteries where you can organize graves into groups.

This was fine and very handy.  Then they built in links, which allowed us to attach children to parents and husbands to wives. Even better!

Then it happened.  I kept finding relatives appearing around the country. Some were done by fellow hobbyists, but it was obvious some cemeteries were posting all of their records, even linking to them on their websites. The number of entries on findagrave.com seems to have doubled every few months!  It is unbelievable how many individual entries are now on the site.

It lead to one of those times when I spent a fruitless hour looking at microfilm at a LDS Family History Center, only to have a quick peek at findagrave.com during a five minute break and discovering three more generations of my direct maternal line (mother’s mother’s mother, etc.).

I was having a look at Thomas Dickinson’s entry, thoroughly appreciating his tale of bad luck and very interesting life (you must read that!), when I then went down and clicked on his wife Maria Lowe’s link. I kept clicking on the mother’s links, ultimately ending up at Susanna Stull Swearingen, my 6^th great grandmother. From here I did an online search for Charles Swearingen and Susanna Stull, and it led me to two genealogies, one about Gerrit Sweringen from the Netherlands and the other the excellent The Stulls of “Millsborough,” by Chris H. Bailey. Both of these are available online for free, but Bailey’s book was so outstanding I ordered one.

Can you trust what you find in published genealogies? Sometimes.  I like to go with trust, then verify. So I believed for about an hour the story from the Gerrit Sweringen book about Marmaduke Swearingen being the legendary Blue Jacket who led the tribes against General Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1812.  Then I read Chris Bailey’s The Stulls documentation of the DNA reports debunking the myths—the DNA of Swearingen and Blue Jacket descendants show no relation. That’s how you can spot good genealogists: they go after the truth and let you know when they aren’t sure about something!

In my next post, I’d like to introduce you to an old school book which is now incredibly inexpensive and has an excellent chapter on truth called “How the Rules Apply to Genealogy,” Ancestry's Guide to Research: Case Studies in American Genealogy
, by Johni Cerny and Arlene Eakle.