In 2017, I Decided to Solve a Long-Held Mystery About My Family. What I Found Changed Me Forever.
Reading Time: 14 minutesAncestry, Find a Grave: When I went looking for my grandfather, I got more than I bargained for.
It’s a good way to spend a Saturday morning—if, admittedly, a strange one. I wake up and pack a tote bag with leather gardening gloves, a water bottle, a towel, and headphones. Then I drive to one of Chicago’s 272 cemeteries and spend hours taking pictures of the dead.
I do this once a month or so. Alongside shots of my dog and gym selfies, my phone’s camera roll is filled with photos of gravestones of all shapes, sizes, and materials: massive granite monuments fit for the Chicago industrialists buried underneath them, humble flat markers that I’m prone to tripping over, and sandstone slabs so worn down by centuries of sun, rain, and snow that there’s no telling who’s buried there.
I should say: It’s not just me. The photos I take end up on a website called FindaGrave.com, a repository of cemeteries around the world. Created in 1995 by a Salt Lake City resident named Jim Tipton, the website began as a place to catalog his hobby of visiting and documenting celebrity graves. In the late 1990s, Tipton began to allow other users to contribute their own photos and memorials for famous people as well. In 2010, Find a Grave finally allowed non-celebrities to be included. Since then, volunteers—also known as ‘gravers’—have stalwartly photographed and recorded tombstones, mausoleums, crosses, statues, and all other manner of graves for posterity.
Think of it like a social media site, but for the dead. People can use it to ‘visit’ the graves of their loved ones—in some cases, maybe even for the first time. But it’s not just for mourning or nostalgia: The revelations held in cataloged graves have proven vital for everyone ranging from historians to journalists to your aunt who is really into your extended family’s history. And there is a lot of information. More than a million contributors add thousands of new memorials and photos by the hour.
This graving free-for-all has caused some controversy over the years. Find a Grave—now owned by Ancestry.com, with a commercial interest in its operation—has a moderation team that works to ensure the new graves are real, the bios are correct, and people’s requests get doled out appropriately. But this team is a decentralized crew of volunteers, many of whom are older folks doing this in their spare time. Things can get weird—and they have. After all, how jarring would it be to find out that someone had created a memorial to your dead relative and posted it online without your knowledge or consent?
I should know. It happened to me.
Before I was ever a graver myself, one of my now-comrades in Texas wrote a memorial to a man on Find a Grave. It waited for me there until I decided to uncover one of the mysteries of my family’s past. When I did, I wasn’t quite ready for what I found. Like many other gravers, I’ve come to understand personally the compulsion behind it—and all a simple discovery can do to a person still among the living.
Jenn O’Donnell first got involved with Find a Grave 16 years ago, after she learned her father-in-law was orphaned as a child and decided to track down the identity of his parents. ‘I just Googled an ancestor’s name and their Find a Grave Page popped up,’ O’Donnell told me.
What began as a useful tool to help with her genealogy project morphed into a hobby and then a passion. It’s a story that’s familiar to so many other gravers on the website. While we stumble upon Find a Grave for different reasons, we end up finding out there’s more to it than just pictures. It’s also a community of researchers and archivists who are dedicated to the singular goal of memorializing and preserving the memory of as many people as possible.
Before Find a Grave, it could be difficult for loved ones of the deceased to find information about cemeteries and burial sites. Often, it’d require getting ahold of city records, speaking to people at local genealogical and historical societies, and interviewing your family members or anyone who might have known the dead person you’re looking for and be able to point you to where they are buried.
Now, all of that detective work can fall to anyone with spare time. ‘I think many just sort of get the bug,’ O’Donnell said. ‘They’re interested in uncovering everything they can.’
Anyone can submit a request to have any gravestone photographed and recorded on Find a Grave. Most requests come in from far away. For example, if you found out you have a great-great-grandparent buried in the middle of the Texas brushland but you live in Connecticut, you could ask a graver who lives in Laredo to swing by and take a photo for you.
There are, in my view, three categories of gravers: First, there are the mercenaries who, like me, fulfill specific photo requests for users. Then there are those who like to ‘mow the lawn,’ a Find-a-Grave term used to describe volunteers who go up and down the rows of graves in a specific cemetery to photograph each and every stone they come across. (‘I thought to myself, ‘I’m just going to photograph the whole darn place,’ ‘ said O’Donnell, who started as the first kind of graver, and then became the second.) Finally, there are the research junkies who do deep dives into a person’s history to create online biographies. Known as ‘memorials,’ these are a kind of online profile for particular dead people created after gravers read their obituaries in their local paper, take it upon themselves to photograph the newly christened grave, and even sometimes go as far as researching the person’s life to record more information on a kind of Facebook profile for the afterlife.
Al Wilson, a Pennsylvania-based graver and local historian in his city, is interested in the documentation aspect of Find a Grave. Over the 16 years that he’s been on the website, he’s uploaded more than 14,000 pictures, with 4,700 being new memorials of people who have never been documented. ‘These are connections that I’m very proud of,’ Wilson told me. Without him, they might have simply been lost to time.
The work of graving will never be finished. There are roughly 144,000 cemeteries in the United States alone. That number doesn’t account for all of the family plots on private property and Native American burials of the past, both of which can also be found on the website, though less commonly. It also doesn’t account for places that used to be cemeteries that the living have simply built over.
Graves also change all the time. A gravestone that was photographed 20 years ago might look nothing like it used to, depending on the material it’s made from, the environment it’s in, or even damage from accidents and vandalism. That’s why folks like O’Donnell sometimes take and re-take pictures of the same gravestone. Cemeteries and burial sites sometimes remove graves, including the bodies, over time, too, adding even more confusion to an already complex process. And, of course, new graves and cemeteries are created every single day.
Where I live in Chicago, I sometimes run through Lincoln Park, which was once the site of the biggest cemetery in the city. Gravestones were erected there in the 1840s. By the 1860s, though, the municipal government had removed more than 20,000 bodies, along with all the indicators that the dead were ever there. Historians believe they likely left 12,000 corpses still buried in parkland that’s now used for softball games, bike rides, and grill-outs. An untold number of bodies lie buried somewhere in the ground beneath our feet. No one will likely ever know their stories.
In 2017, I decided to find out who my grandfather was.
As my grandma always told us, he was an American soldier who served in the Vietnam war. She was a Vietnamese woman living in central Vietnam during the war. They met, fell in love, and had a child in 1965: my mother.
Shortly after the war ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975, he disappeared from my mother and grandmother’s lives with no real notice and left no trace. All my mom’s life and most of mine, we had no idea who he was or where he had gone. Even after she later brought the family to the United States, my grandma was quiet about any specifics. The war left lasting trauma and scars on everyone who survived it, so we never pressed the issue.
With the help of some DNA tests, years of speaking with relatives and researching census records, and waiting, I finally did find out who he was: a Black man who lived in Houston, Texas, and had another family back in the United States while he was serving in Vietnam. A research partner and friend discovered his obituary and forwarded it to me after I learned his name. This information eventually led me to his Find a Grave page. As soon as I found my grandfather, I also learned he was dead.
Keith Cornell Brown, my grandfather, was born on June 26, 1939, and died on August 11, 2013. He was the son of Kendall Clifton Brown (my great-grandfather) and Estella Betty Davis (my great-grandmother). He was also the grandson of Jerry Robert Davis (my great-great-grandfather) and Minnie Ola Shields (my great-great-grandmother).
All of that was on his memorial page. In an instant—a single click of my mouse—Find a Grave sprouted an entire branch of my family tree that I didn’t even know was there. I stared at the screen for a while trying to make sense of the information. I read and reread the page, as if the words and dates might change if I did it enough times. Maybe I’d find out I was wrong, that it wasn’t my grandfather, the person I’d been searching for my entire life, who I’d just found the death record for?
But no. This was his memorial. His name. His birth and death date. Though there was no gravestone picture, it was still shocking to come across the profile. My grandfather—and he was already gone.
Stories of people being surprised by memorials to dead relatives are common with Find a Grave. At its worst, finding a profile page you didn’t know about can feel like a violation of your family’s privacy during a sad and traumatic time, particularly for graves that are memorialized soon after someone’s passing. In a critical piece that accused Find a Grave of backing ‘bad actors and bad data,’ OneZero reported that a ‘distraught parent’ posted a complaint about Find a Grave back in 2010 after they discovered an online memorial to their dead 6-year-old child. ‘Find a grave.com photographed my 6 year old daughter’s headstone and put it online,’ the user wrote. ‘I was aghast when it popped up on my monitor. I have contacted the prosecutor and state police.’ Another complaint online from 2021 alleged that a memorial was added to Find a Grave ‘before a family knew a death had happened.’
According to other gravers I spoke to, these kinds of situations are rare—but not entirely surprising. That’s because some gravers create memorials for the dead as soon as they find the obituary in their local paper. Some take it upon themselves to photograph a new grave and research the person’s life to record on the digital memorial.
They do this even if the person just died. Even if the funeral hasn’t happened yet, and there is no proper grave yet to memorialize. Often Find a Grave sweeps in before the mourning has stopped—if it ever does.
Crista Cowan, the corporate genealogist of Find a Grave’s parent company Ancestry.com, told me that much of the information gathered for the site’s online memorials are from funeral home websites and public obituaries. This information is already out in the world when someone dies. ‘It’s interesting to me that people struggle with just somebody taking that information and creating a memorial on Find a Grave, and where that boundary is between appropriate and inappropriate,’ Cowan said.
Cowan said that the company made a policy change in 2022 to ask people to wait to make a memorial page until they know exactly where the burial location is. Also, if a person has died in the past three months, the company will ask how they’re related to the person. ‘If you’re not related to them in a one- or two-degree relationship, we limit the information that is visible to the public,’ she said.
For her part, Cowan thinks Find a Grave is just another place where information—valuable information about our society—can be made available. But therein lies the issue for so many people. The website and the problems that some people have with it are a reflection of our relationship with the internet, and the way that it has eroded so much of our privacy, particularly for such personal things. Since all this information is online, people no longer have to travel to a specific cemetery to ‘visit’ the dead. With a few keystrokes, someone in Indiana might be able to see the grave of someone in Scotland. There is no barrier to entry.
It’s a double-edged sword. For some, the memorials can bring a sense of comfort. ‘We were leaving the cemetery and my brother had just been buried,’ O’Donnell recalled. ‘I looked up the cemetery because it was a place I’d never been before and didn’t want to forget the name of it. I plugged in his surname, and poof, there was already a memorial created a couple days after he died but before we actually buried him.’ And the digital archive keeps people alive, in a sense. Wilson told me about an old chestnut that’s often repeated in the genealogy community: ‘All people die twice. The first time is when their heart stops beating. The second time is when people forget about them.’ Find a Grave allows these people to stave off their second death.
But with a grave just a click away, we lose the time it takes to get to a cemetery, to gather our thoughts, to move into a space to commune with the underworld with intention. And the accessibility of these memorials also leads to an undeniable sense of being watched by anyone, anywhere, all the time—even in death.
The sun was beating down on me so hard that I felt like I was about to faint on the gravestones. It was Juneteenth of this year. I was out at Burr Oak Cemetery, deep in Chicago’s South Side, trying to find the grave of a Vietnam veteran named Private Richard Walker, per a user request on Find a Grave. According to his profile, Walker was ‘killed in action from multiple fragmentation wounds’ during an operation in the central highlands of Vietnam 57 years ago to that day. He had enlisted less than a year earlier, and started his tour three months before he died. He was only 19 years old. He will always be 19 years old.
I spent three hours searching for Private Walker at Burr Oak, which is also one of the earliest cemeteries in Chicago to have served the Black community. Residents include jazz and blues legends, actors, writers, and activists. The most famous is Emmett Till, whose death helped spark the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, is buried not far from her son. Their graves stand out from the rest as they’re perennially adorned: flowers, stuffed animals, framed pictures, and letters from people all over the world. It’s a little more difficult to find the graves of the less famous.
All graveyards serve the same purpose, but I’ve found that no two are ever the same when it comes to how the plots are laid out and how you find them. The best cemeteries have detailed rosters, maps, and even living, human guides waiting in air-conditioned offices to help you find specific graves. Often, though, there’s little or even none of that. That forces you to be diligent, treading up and down the rows of plots until you find the person you’re looking for.
There are tricks. Most cemeteries are organized chronologically, if loosely so. When you know the year your person died, you can navigate to the areas where there are more people who also died around that time and try to find them there. Cemeteries tend to keep basic ledgers of their graves that include the name, date, and location of the burials. But those records may not hint at where on the land the person is buried—just the fact that they’re buried there.
This is what I learned when I tried to find Private Walker: There’s no tree cover in Burr Oak, unlike in Rosehill Cemetery and Graceland Cemetery in Chicago’s North Side, the latter of which doubles as an arboretum. Burr Oak is a poorer graveyard than both of those, and lacks the trees, plants, and waterways that can be found in the whiter and wealthier cemeteries.
During my search, I would settle into my car in lieu of leafy shade, feeling my sweat-drenched T-shirt instantly cool in the air conditioning, and try to contemplate where I would search for Private Walker next.
Disappointment is a familiar feeling when it comes to Find a Grave. Sometimes you do get lucky: Once, while I was in Iowa for a relay race, I passed by a cemetery on a country road and ran off course in order to see if I could snap photo requests (I was able to do two). There are not many better feelings in the world than sending the relative of a dead person that picture and getting a thank-you in return. It’s what sucked me into graving, despite my startling first encounter with Find a Grave. It’s what continues to make this work feel necessary and worthwhile to me, despite the criticisms.
But you simply cannot fulfill every request you set out to fulfill. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try and how long you spend walking the rows of a cemetery, it feels like some dead just don’t want to be found.
I never found Private Walker’s grave, and as I write this, his profile page lacks an image of one. His stone is still out there, waiting for someone else to find it.
The first photo I ever took for Find a Grave was one of my grandfather. I was in Texas for a reporting trip at a border town several years ago, and, having found him on Find a Grave, decided to drive six hours to Leggett to see if I could meet him for the first time.
I remember pulling my rental car into the parking lot of a small church tucked away in a copse. It was a Monday. The church stood empty like a silent sentinel over a small cemetery next to it. I was the only one there.
This is a good time to note: I’m very, very, very afraid of death. The thought of it and what happens after we die is enough to send me into quiet panic attacks at odd hours of the day, whether it’s when I’m trying to fall asleep, working out at the gym, or typing this very sentence. But when I go to these cemeteries and take pictures of the gravestones, I’m not usually scared. It gives me a profound sense of peace that, at least in this small way, I can help these people stay remembered—and keep their memory alive—just a little while longer.
When I went looking for my grandfather’s grave, though, I was terrified. He was a man who I never knew but had been looking for my entire life. He was someone who was somehow less than dead for me, for my never having known him. He was a ghost who had haunted me and my family for so long. Yet I knew there was also a chance that I wouldn’t be able to find him in this cemetery. That I might never be able to see what there was to see of him, despite all of my searching.
I found him immediately—though I was surprised I did.
My grandfather and his mother (my great-grandmother) were all buried in the same shabby, gray vault. Their grave had once had plastic lettering with their names on it, but those had peeled and fallen away into the grass around them, leaving only a ghostly outline from where they used to be. It was an unloved grave, the home of two people who didn’t have people to visit and care for it. There were no gifts. There wasn’t even an enduring marker for the birth and death dates.
I collapsed in the grass in front of the vault, tears streaming down my face despite myself. Here he finally was: my grandfather. Here I finally was: his grandson—the only person who seemed to care to remember him.
After a while, I stood up, pulled out my phone, and snapped dozens of pictures of his grave. It felt strange, almost anticlimactic. I had come there to do what I’d wanted to do for so long. Now, I just had to leave. It didn’t feel right, though—was this all there was to it?
‘Hey Grandpa,’ I said out loud, my voice surprising me in the quiet cemetery. ‘I finally made it. It’s good to see you.’
I cleared my throat and felt a little silly. He couldn’t hear me. I was talking to no one. And yet, I kept going. ‘I know Mom wanted to be here too. We’ll make a trip down here one day.’ I paused, before adding, ‘I promise.’
Birds were singing in the trees around me. A small breeze picked up and I realized how much I was sweating under the Texas sun. I nodded and headed to my car.
On my way to Houston, where I had a flight to catch in a few hours, I stopped at a roadside barbecue restaurant not far from my grandfather’s grave. I thought it’d be a good place to look at the photos I’d found, and think about which ones to upload to his Find a Grave. I sat at the counter where an older Black man took my order. I wondered, for a moment, if there was a chance he knew my family, if he knew who my grandfather was. I wondered if there was a chance I was related to him, too.
‘So what brings you to Leggett?’ he asked with a friendly Texas accent and kind eyes that told me that he was genuinely interested in what I had to say. I asked what had given away that I wasn’t a local, and he laughed and nodded his chin at my rental car with Massachusetts plates in the parking lot. ‘Not too often we get young folks like you this way.’
‘I’m just here to visit some family,’ I said, surprised at how easily and quickly the word family came out of my mouth. ‘I live in Chicago, but they’re from this area.’
The man smiled. ‘That’s good,’ he said, before pointing a knobby finger at me. ‘Never forget where you came from.’
I smiled back at him with my phone still warm in my hands, the screen glowing with one of the many pictures of my grandfather’s grave.
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