If you are not familiar with the Find-A-Grave website, you need to learn about it. This last weekend, they topped 100 Million memorial pages with information, including headstone photos, histories, links to other family members, and photos of loved ones who have passed. Each memorial is as good as the information submitted by family members and volunteers all over the country. If you know where someone is buried and there is no memorial yet, you can simply request that a photo be taken of that person’s headstone and usually within days, sometimes hours or minutes, a volunteer living near that cemetery will snatch up that request and go take the photo and post it.

I do a lot of descendant research. The first place I always look is on Find-A-Grave to see who is posted there. Start with a great-grandparent. See if their children are listed and linked. You can follow families down through time, gathering family members. Do this for each of your family lines. When you’ve mined everything you can find on one line, start on another. When you complete a generation, go back to an earlier generation. Gather the information you find in a data base or on Family Group Sheets. What a great way to bring families together.

For more information, please visit http://www.findagrave.com/index.html
See also my 24 April 2013 post for ideas on how to organize a FAG activiy.