How Ancestry.com’s Find A Grave Encourages Bad Actors and Bad Data

Mygrandma died in April of 2004 at the age of 85, and what remains of her today are vestiges of a life lived entirely offline — the typewritten letters she’d mail to me six or seven times a year; the gold wedding ring I wore when I married my husband; the oak grandfather clock that chimes every quarter hour in my parents’ living room in Maryland. In death, though, my grandma is more online than ever. A few months ago, my sister stumbled across a page created for my grandmother on the website <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">FindAGrave.com</a>. It wasn’t immediately clear what she’d uncovered. A death profile of some sort, the postmortem equivalent of a page on Facebook? Some of the details listed were familiar to me — the places of her birth and death, her husband’s name. Others were a revelation — her wedding anniversary, her mother’s maiden name, the year her sister was born. Four photos adorned the page: two of her headstone, and two of her as a child, the latter of which my mom can’t recall ever seeing before. <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/the-digital-undertakers-inside-the-obsessive-community-racing-to-put-the-dead-online-f3199147e968">Website</a>