I snuck away on Saturday and went to Melrose, Minnesota. I took in a cousin’s auction, talked with some relatives and then spent some time in St. Michael’s Cemetery. I have bunches of relatives in this cemetery and I devoted some time there to snap some pictures of the monuments. Needing to be quick and head back home, I only took pictures of markers I knew that were absolutely connected. My family history file has over 21,000 names in it and it’s difficult to remember all the connections off the top of my head.
So I whipped through the rows and took 44 pictures. When I got back home I surveyed the results and did find a few people that I either didn’t have a clue who they were or how they connected. I’ve got some work to do to sort them out.
My cousin Quincy Stroeing, while at the auction, relayed to me that he was “getting into” Find A Grave. I had been to it before, but never contributed. I thought I should offer up some of my recent pictures and I started uploading pictures and information.
After 25 interments and 31 photos, I do have a few initial gripes. The images that you upload need to be less than 250KB. That size is fine, but they should remove this hurdle from the contributor. Let folks upload any size photo and let the server make the appropriate size reductions. Another gripe is linking of photos. There’s no need for me to upload two photos if two people share a monument. That seems like a tremendous waste of resources when I could just link things together. Lastly, the site needs a healthy dose of Ajax. Drilling down through country, state, county and city could be done more seamlessly and without page reloading. Find A Grave is cool and all, but it could be a lot more sexy.
