The Genealogy Guys take a stand
George Morgan and Drew Smith are The Genealogy Guys — educators, writers, speakers, and producers of the popular podcast by the same name.
They have long been counted among The Legal Genealogist‘s friends.
And never have I been prouder of that fact — prouder of them, and their courage — than I am today.
You can see from the banner of their website that, yesterday, they listed five sponsors: MyHeritage, RootsMagic, Vivid-Pix, Newspapers.com and Find A Grave.
As of this morning, they have three sponsors.
At midnight last night, George and Drew terminated their sponsorship by Find A Grave and its sister Ancestry site Newspapers.com over the failure — indeed, the refusal — of Ancestry to take meaningful steps even in the wake of the Uvalde shooting tragedy to enforce genealogical ethics on its Find A Grave site.1
Their reasons are clearly stated in their blog this morning. Speaking for their corporate entity, Aha! Seminars, Inc., they wrote:
The genealogical community has repeatedly requested that Ancestry.com, the parent company of Find a Grave, establish ethical policies and processes for controlling the addition of memorial records at its site. These include, but are not limited to, preventing “volunteers” from creating memorials indiscriminately for anyone they choose, especially for the recently deceased to whom they have no connection. Ancestry.com has incentivized such activity by publishing the number of memorials created by individuals. Ancestry.com has further encouraged competition by publishing announcements on Facebook and elsewhere naming “Volunteer of the Month’ for the number of new records created.
Within hours of the identification of victims of the recent massacre at the public school in Uvalde, Texas, “volunteers” added memorial pages for Find a Grave for the victims. These “volunteers” were not family members and did not have complete or correct personal information for the victims. These people usurped the rights of families. The genealogical community has been outraged that Ancestry.com has not implemented ethical and respectful policies that prevent this egregious activity by non-family members and impose a respectful delay on when and by whom memorials for recent deaths can be created.
Aha! Seminars, Inc., contacted an Ancestry.com representative to appeal for changes and received boilerplate responses that neither acknowledged the problems nor indicated that any changes were forthcoming. Those boilerplate responses were apparently sent to all persons who contacted Ancestry.com to complain.
Inasmuch as Ancestry.com has continually failed to address the problems and develop responsible, ethical, and respectable policies, especially after the Uvalde massacre, Aha! Seminars, Inc., no longer wishes to have Ancestry.com’s subsidiaries, Find a Grave and Newspapers.com as sponsors of our podcast. We invoked cancellation clauses in the sponsorship contracts and effected the discontinuation of the sponsorships effective June 30, 2022.2
Folks, it takes a special kind of courage to take this kind of action. Many many members of the genealogical community have pleaded with Ancestry to act in a meaningful way. We’ve spoken out out directly and as powerfully as we can. But George and Drew have done so in a way that affects them in their pocketbook. They have literally put their money where their mouth is. They have shown, in the most direct way possible, the courage of their convictions.
In their blog post, The Genealogy Guys concluded: “We hope that Ancestry.com will take action on this long-standing problem.”3
So do we all, my friends.
So do we all.
Ancestry… are you listening?
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “The courage of their convictions,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 1 July 2022).
SOURCES
- See generally Judy G. Russell, “Ancestry, this one’s on you,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 31 May 2022 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 1 July 2022). ↩
- George G. Morgan and Drew Smith, “Genealogy Guys Podcast Terminates Sponsorships by Find a Grave & Newspapers.com,” The Genealogy Guys Blog, posted 1 July 2022 (http://blog.genealogyguys.com/ : accessed 1 July 2022). ↩
- Ibid. ↩
Well done, guys! And thanks, Judy!
Thanks to these guys for taking a stand against this disturbing practice. I hate the fact that when someone in my family passes away one of my first thoughts has to be I need to get the Find-A-Grave memorial posted before someone else does. This is disrespectful and disturbing.
Oh, for pete’s sakes!
HA! This lil stand wont do much anything because remember, Find a Grave was not created with the intentions of being a Genealogy research site. It reminds me of children saying if you wont play my way I’ll take my toys and go play someplace else.
SO be it, those who support Find A Grave and their stand against people who want to force their rules on them do not have to listen to their pod cast. It goes both ways.
Except they were acquired by a genealogical company that incorporates it into their genealogical parent website and very much promotes it as a genealogical resource. If you want to discuss the original intentions of Mr. Tipton when he founded the website back in the 90s, then realize that it was originally for the graves of noteworthy individuals including presidents, actors, etc. Thankfully that was expanded and became a de facto genealogical resource. And let’s not forget that they’re not the only resource on the web, billiongraves may well turn out to be a better option for genealogists who have the smallest amount of self respect.
Bravo! I have experienced this memorial idiocy firsthand, having to request my aunt and uncle’s memorial transfer from complete strangers after returning from their joint funeral in 2020. Sadly, I was grateful that we did not publish my father’s obituary (at his request), as that ensured me the opportunity to create it myself a month after his passing. Unfortunately, Ancestry has entered the realm of companies who are majority-owned by investment firms. The only language they understand is monetary. I hope more have the conviction and courage that George and Drew have displayed.
I do believe the Uvalde memorials were created by one person, and one alone. Bad form but the sky isn’t falling.
This, “creating memorials indiscriminately for anyone they choose”, get over it. Likely more than 85% of the graves available at the site were added by people unrelated. It’s why the database is as large as it is. Without volunteers the site would be a very sad, very small, database.That’s just plain foolishness and those who love to clutch pearls and groan would be also pulling their hair out as well.
Nobody has ever suggested volunteers should not create memorials for persons to whom they are unrelated. The proposal is — and has always been — merely to prevent unrelated persons from creating one for someone who has recently died for a short time to allow the family time to grieve and to choose to create its own memorial if it wishes to.
I was photographing gravestones a few years ago for BillionGraves and had a man approach me upset and asked if I was “with that lady” who a few weeks prior had asked a member of a grieving family when they’d have a marker installed so she could get a photo and add it to the memorial. Between that and having to request a memorial for a relative be transferred to me after finding that it had had someone else’s photo and had his wife listed as his deceased daughter. FindAGrave is as bad as FamilySearch and it’s public trees, it’s an uphill battle of trying to correct the carelessness of others.
@Wanda: The most maddening thing about FindAGrave for me has been that the users who manage and create the most memorial pages are not only the *worst* at maintaining the integrity of the data, but they ALSO hold everyone else to an absurdly higher standard of data quality before they will lift a finger to revisit the garbage they entered. I once got into a nasty exchange with one of these users after I quickly pointed out that the data she had entered without a second thought was obviously wrong, and was for a different person with the same very common name who was not buried in that grave (in fact, they were likely not even buried in the same US state!). Rather than simply spending 5 seconds researching what I had told her to double-check, she demanded that *I* provide full citations rigorously proving her obvious, lazy error before she would even consider changing anything! This person currently manages almost A QUARTER OF A MILLION memorial pages.
Re the issue that started this thread…I agree that Ancestry should do *something* about the issue of people starting memorials for the recently deceased, but I also think they are in a bit of a bind that others here might not be appreciating. Given how casual FindAGrave power users are now about data quality, I could totally see how instituting a simple rule in the software making it impossible for users to create pages within X days of that person’s death could actually backfire: If you say “sorry, you have entered a date of death for this person that is too recent, the page cannot be created”, a lot of these clowns will either a) enter the *wrong* date of death for that person and create the memorial anyway, or b) enter no date of death at all (as far as I’m aware, the system doesn’t currently require users to enter the date of death, does it?). If it is all about padding their numbers, they will do whatever it takes to create those pages, errors or no errors.
Good for Drew and George! The people who created Find A Grave memorials for those murdered in Uvalde before the victims were even buried are ghouls. Ancestry/Find A Grave need to have policies in place that do a better job of preventing this type of behavior.
Well done. You have the support of many a family historian! How many of us want our own family members profiled before we’ve even had a short chance to grieve?
You have posted complaints but not solutions.
How long must someone be diseased before a memorial created?
How should Find-A-Grave verify that the creator is indeed the authorized representative?
I would suggest that Find-A-Grave put a notification on the page we’re new memorials are created when the person has been deceased for less than 6 months asking that if the creator is not a close family member to not create a new memorial out of respect for the family.
It appears you have overlooked the proposed solutions here (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2019/08/05/a-modest-proposal/) and here (https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/findagrave-made-better/) and …
It’s time for people to start taking a stand on this, and today I cancelled my Ancestry account, and gave Ancestry’s apparent refusal to change the way memorials are created on Find A Grave as the reason for my cancellation.
I entirely agree with you, Judy. I have also experienced the sorrow of a sibling’s passing “reported” by a Findagrave user.
It confounds me why an otherwise reputable company with hundreds of thousands of paying customers is so tone deaf on what should be common sense.
Ancestry.com knows we’re heavily “invested” in time and money on our genealogy projects. I will keep this issue in mind as I consider my options.
So does this mean the Genealogy Guys aren’t paying Ancestry any more or Ancestry isn’t paying them?
Ancestry is not paying them.
Thanks for posting about this and thanks to Drew and George for taking a stand. I’m surprised that some don’t seem to comprehend the issue. It’s distressing for the memorial of a loved to be commandeered by a stranger, and it only adds to the suffering when the survivors have no control.
>> I’m surprised that some don’t seem to comprehend the issue.
It’s only a handful, but boy do they ever pop out of the woodwork here every time (and only when) this issue is raised.
Thanks for pointing out the principled stance of the Genealogy Guys. Kudos to them.
And, so frustrating that Ancestry continues to ignore this issue.
I’m glad that the Genealogy Guys took a stand on this.
I just checked a few names in Find a Grave from the latest mass shooting, and the names weren’t there. Maybe a few of the ghouls developed a conscience. I hope I’m not giving them any ideas.
Bravo, Drew and George!!
This… Ancestry and Find A Grave, is how ethical genealogists behave!
Perhaps more of us should follow their lead and speak with our wallets. Thank you to the Genealogy Guys for your shining example of how together, we can effect real change!