How accurate is information listed on Find a Grave?
Using FamilySearch, I have created a 15-generation tree of my Father’s side of our family. I have prepared a Microsoft Word document to give to my brother and sister as well as my children using screen captures from my FamilySearch tree. In addition to the screen captures from the FamilySearch tree, I have also been using screen captures from Find a Grave to provide additional information about particular family members.
I have now run into a dilemma. My FamilySearch tree seems to have linked the correct families between generation 8 and generation 9 regarding a child named Henry. But when comparing FamilySearch information from the same generation 8 to generation 9 to that on Find a Grave, Henry's, birth and death dates do not agree. Henry is a different person on Find a Grave than in my FamilySearch tree.
Answers
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The information on Findagrave is only as good as the knowledge and care shown by the person or persons who created and linked the memorials. Some contributors are very good and thorough. Others are guessers, to be kind.
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Review all the available historical records and make your determination based on that information.
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Find a Grave is a secondary source, at best. It would be helpful for Family Search to flag secondary sources and encourage primary sourcing at the person level.
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@MariaMunger, gravestone photos on Find A Grave can be argued to be primary sources (for the gravestones). On the other hand, 100% of the things that Source Linker attaches are secondary sources. Ditto for every single suggestion made by the hinting system.
Source classifications are of extremely limited utility, and I fully support all decisions by FS to not engage in assigning them.
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I agree there's a continuum, and the primary vs secondary distinction is therefore too simplistic, but it should be possible to distinguish between (say) an official local birth registration image, a FindAGrave photo of a tombstone, and the human or computer generated metadata that has got itself attached to these images with vastly varying levels of accuracy (FS indexes get corrupted, as we know, even where they are correct to start with, and tombstone images can get attached to the wrong cemetery, as I have seen).
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi Even the headstone can't always be considered a primary source. I have an ancestor who's headstone was replaced, and the dates got messed up in the process.
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Just a comment that this is a thread from 2021 that has been revived. According to his profile, the OP has not visited the community since the day of the post.
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A gravestone isn't a source for anything beyond itself: it tells you that at some point, someone paid to have it erected with that inscription. (Or was unwilling/unable to pay to have that inscription fixed, like on my great-great-grandmother's gravestone, which somehow ended up with the wrong death year, but none of us have bothered to get it corrected. It's in the back corner of a cemetery where the newer parts are full of stones for people who aren't even dead yet. Yes, sometimes they're for couples who are both still living; they buy the parcel and have the stone erected at the same time.)
Dunno why the poster on June 12 chose to revive this zombie thread, but I felt I had to respond to her suggestion that FS flag secondary sources: it would mean flagging everything in the entire database that Source Linker and the hinting system exclusively work with.
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Mod note: As has been pointed out by others, this thread is old and will be closed. Please open a new discussion if you have anything new to add.
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