Why are the birth and death locations not indexed from Findagrave memorials
Although a FindaGrave memorial can contain birth and death locations, as well as birth and death dates, the indexed record created by familysearch contains only the dates. Can Familysearch indexes of memorial records be improved to include the locations? You currently have to add locations manually.
Answers
-
My concern would be that, in most cases, there is no means of knowing birth and death locations from FindAGrave. You say (correctly) that we have to add locations manually. I would say that the time that we do need to spend, is the time confirming these details first. All too often, we have no idea where the information comes from - it could simply be from somebody's fanciful tree and we do not respect our relatives if we don't check that information first.
In this instance, the birth and death dates are on the stone - that's fine. The rest of the stuff appears to come from that mini-biography but there is no source given for that mini-biography. Again, it could be good, solid information - or it could be what someone's distant relative thought was true, but isn't...
Like many people, I have concerns about how FindAGrave is mutating from Finding A Grave to unsourced, potted stories of debatable accuracy. We shouldn't be accepting this stuff at face value. (Case in point - According to FindAGrave, my great-great-aunt is buried in California - she's actually buried in Connecticut. There is a perfectly sensible reason for that mismatch - but it needs to be sorted out first, not accepted without question).
2