Using Find a Grave Ethically and Efficiently – An Interview with Daniel Loftus

Summary

Podcast Summary: Using Find a Grave Ethically and Efficiently – An Interview with Daniel Loftus

Podcast: Family Tree Magazine Podcast
Host: Family Tree Editors (hosted by Lisa Louise Cook)
Guest: Daniel Loftus, genealogist & creator of Project Infant
Date: October 15, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode is devoted to getting the most out of the popular genealogy website Find a Grave. Host Lisa Louise Cook interviews genealogist Daniel Loftus, who shares both practical tips and ethical considerations that family historians should keep in mind. The discussion dives into how to use Find a Grave efficiently, best practices when visiting cemeteries, features to better organize your research, and the importance of respecting families and the recently deceased when creating online memorials.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Planning Your Visit to a Cemetery

(02:42 – 06:31)

• Preparation is Key: Daniel advises planning your cemetery visits in advance. Use Find a Grave to check if a cemetery is listed. If not, start a new page and add details later.
• Photo Requests: One of Daniel’s main tips is to look for open photo requests on Find a Grave before visiting. These help people who can’t visit in person to see the graves of loved ones. Daniel shares how a friend’s photo of his grandaunt’s grave in New York meant a lot to him.
  • Quote (03:33): “Check to see if there are any open photo requests and if there are, try and fulfill them if you can.” — Daniel Loftus

2. Staying Organized with Virtual Cemeteries

(04:59 – 06:27)

• Daniel recommends making use of Find a Grave’s “virtual cemeteries” feature to categorize and track your research.
• He keeps separate virtual cemeteries for each branch of his family and for gravestones he still needs to visit.
  • Quote (05:38): “Other people may want to do it in different ways... but I don’t see virtual cemeteries used a whole lot, so I figured that might be a good thing to mention as well.” — Daniel Loftus

3. Maximizing the Mapping Features

(05:52 – 06:31)

• Turn on GPS when taking marker photos.
• When a photo is uploaded with geolocation data, Find a Grave will display a “Show on Map” button, which pinpoints the exact spot in the cemetery via Google Maps.
  • Quote (06:18): “Having that facility of geotagged photos... is beyond helpful.” — Daniel Loftus

4. Important Features of Find a Grave

(06:31 – 07:48)

• Family Linkages: You can link parents, spouses, and children’s memorials using unique memorial numbers. This enables clear family connections across pages, even when relatives are buried in different places.
  • Quote (06:56): “When you’re editing a memorial… you can link their memorials together by their memorial number… parents, spouses, children, you can do all of that…” — Daniel Loftus

5. Don’ts and Ethical Considerations

(08:19 – 13:57)

• Don’t Cut Off Contact:

  • Daniel strongly encourages members not to disable contact features. Hiding your email or disallowing messages blocks collaboration and efforts to correct errors or share information.
    • Quote (09:25): “Don’t cut off people from trying to contact you because you might be able to offer them information that you are aware of.” — Daniel Loftus

• Wait, Don’t Make:

  • Daniel advocates for waiting before creating memorials for newly deceased individuals—especially soon after their obituary appears.
  • Creating a memorial before burial or during the family’s grieving period can feel insensitive and cause distress.
    • Quote (10:15): “It is very common… for memorials to be created incredibly soon after the demise of someone… sometimes before the person is actually buried.” — Daniel Loftus
    • Quote (11:29): “I would just ask, you know, to be mindful… there’ll be time to add someone after, you know, they pass away. I think it’s important that whenever someone dies, you give the family that time to grieve.” — Daniel Loftus
    • Quote (12:39): “Genealogy is personal. It’s about people, and people grieve differently. It’s all just about trying to be as mindful as we possibly can with it, especially when we’re doing something so deeply personal.” — Daniel Loftus

6. Who Can Edit or Control Memorials?

(15:26 – 17:22)

• The original creator controls the memorial, but if a family member claims it for a recently deceased individual, they take over control.
• All edits from non-owners must go through a suggestion process.
  • Quote (16:20): “If they create a memorial, they can make as many changes as they want, but if someone takes it over, they lose that control.” — Daniel Loftus
  • Quote (17:08): “If it is a recently deceased memorial, you do not have to [request it]; it is just a, like, who are you to them? And then you can just take it over.” — Daniel Loftus

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Collaboration: (09:43)
  “Really, genealogy is such a collaborative effort, isn’t it?” — Podcast Host
  “Oh, absolutely, it really is. And if you’re cutting off the means of doing that collaboration, it just makes it a little more tricky.” — Daniel Loftus

• On Mindfulness: (11:29)
  “There’ll be time to add someone after...they pass away. I think it’s important that whenever someone dies, you give the family that time to grieve.” — Daniel Loftus

• On Respect: (12:39)
  “Genealogy is personal. It’s about people, and people grieve differently. And it’s all just about trying to be as mindful as we possibly can with it, especially when we’re doing something so deeply personal.” — Daniel Loftus

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Project Infant: Daniel’s Work Beyond Find a Grave

(17:53 – 18:18)

• Daniel briefly shares about Project Infant, an initiative he started to record and memorialize names of children and women who died in Irish institutions, “to try and give the women and children... their names back.”

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How to Use Find a Grave Efficiently & Ethically:

Do:

• Plan cemetery visits in advance using Find a Grave.
• Fulfill open photo requests for others.
• Use virtual cemeteries for organization.
• Enable contact so others can reach out for info or corrections.
• Use mapping and family-linking features.

Don’t:

• Disable all methods of contact.
• Rush to create memorials for recently deceased strangers or before families have time to grieve.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Tips & ‘Do’s’ of Find a Grave: 02:42 – 07:48
• Ethical ‘Don’ts’ on the Site: 08:19 – 13:57
• Memorial Control & Editing: 15:26 – 17:22
• Project Infant: 17:53 – 18:18

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Summary

This episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about using Find a Grave thoughtfully and productively. Daniel Loftus shares not just his favorite features and organizational hacks, but also his passionate plea for respect, patience, and empathy. He reminds listeners to be cautious about quickly posting memorials and to always keep in mind that real families and real people are at the heart of genealogy. The episode closes with a brief mention of Daniel’s important work memorializing institutional deaths in Ireland. The guidance here can help you become a more effective—and ethical—family history researcher.

Transcript

[Lisa Louise Cook]

Today's episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com Break Down Genealogy Brick walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Did you know Newspapers.com has over 1 billion pages of digitized newspapers dating back to 1690. Their growing collection includes papers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and beyond. Discover birth and marriage announcements, obituaries and everyday stories about your ancestors. In seconds, Newspapers.com can help you fill the gaps between vital records and reveal details about your ancestors lives that you can't find anywhere else. Their easy to use search feature lets you filter your results by date, location, specific paper and more. And when you find something interesting, newspapers.com makes it a snap to share it with your family and friends. You can even save it directly to your ancestry tree. Come explore one billion pages and make infinite discoveries. Today on Newspapers.com use promo code FamilyTreeMagazine for a 20% discount on your subscription. That's promo code FamilyTreeMagazine@ Newspapers.com welcome to the Best Websites Podcast from Family Tree Magazine where where we spotlight the most useful, innovative and downright exciting online tools for family historians. I'm your host, Lisa Louise Cook.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

If you've been in genealogy for any.

[Lisa Louise Cook]

Length of time, you have probably heard.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

About findagrave.com and it's a wonderful resource. But there are some do's and don'ts that will help you get the most out of it and have a successful time using the website. And here to talk about that is genealogist and creator of Project Infant Daniel Daniel Loftus. He is writing an upcoming article on Find a Grave for Family Tree magazine and so I've asked him to join us here on the Best Websites Podcast to talk more about what we should and should not be doing at Find a Grave. Welcome to the podcast, Daniel.

[Daniel Loftus]

Thank you for having me, Lisa.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

It's so interesting as we get into each website has its own, you know, kind of nuances and and specialties and you want to get the most out of your efforts when you work with a website like this. Findagrave.com so I'm hoping that you'll share some of these wonderful tips that you've been putting together in your article with us. And maybe we should start with the positives, the do's. What should we be doing when we get to findagrave.com when I've gone to.

[Daniel Loftus]

Visit a graveyard, I try to make a pecking list of stuff I need to do. So for example, if I'm looking at Find a Grave, I do try to plan my visit as best as I Can. So I might look at a cemetery to see if it's on Find a Grave. And if, if it's not, I'll create a basic outline of a cemetery page and then add it later. But if it's a cemetery that has already been, you know, added to the website already, I will make sure to see how much is up there. And most importantly, my first do would be planning your visit in that, seeing if there are any open photo requests there. Because I've had this happen to me when I had been doing research in New York where a branch of my dad's family ended up going. And a lot of them died in and around Manhattan area. And some were buried in Calvary Cemetery in New York. And the main thing that has helped me is by filing photo requests for headstones or whatever marker may remain for that grave. So it wasn't until a friend of mine helped me get a photo of my grand aunt who died in New York in 1981 that I actually got to see her grave for the first time. And it's really convenient having the photo requests method when you can't go to visit the plot in particular. So that'd be my first thing. Check to see if there's any open photo requests and if there are, try and fulfill them if you can. On the memorial page, they tend to have the grave location. So you can try and find the memorial through that or try and find the marker through that. In Ireland, I know there are cemetery maps or there tends to be cemetery maps. So if you have like a grave location, you can look at the map and then find out where a grave is and go there and take a photo of it and then fulfill it. The second thing I would suggest doing is because there can be an awful lot of people in your family who are on Find a Grave and I like to try and keep organized. So I try and use virtual cemeteries. That is my second tip because virtual cemeteries are very handy in keeping everything organized. So I. I have a virtual cemetery for memorials on finding grave for my dad's side and for my mom's side. But I also have one where it's a. I need to visit this headstone next because it might not have a photo or I just have not gotten around to seeing it yet. So I try and organize it by that. Other people may want to do it in different ways due to how they do it, but I don't see virtual cemeteries used a whole lot. So I figured that might be a good thing to mention as well. And when you're at a cemetery. My third tip would be, when you're taking photos of headstones, turn on your gps, because if you're in a rather significant cemetery, you do want to be able to find a marker easily. And to do that, if you can, go on to a memorial page on FinderGrave, if you have uploaded a photo, a geotagged photo of a headstone or a marker, it will add a show on Map button on the page that you can click into, which takes you to Google Maps, and it gives you the exact coordinates of where the marker is so you can go and visit it yourself. And it is really helpful with the substantial cemeteries because there's a few in Mayo that I visit. And having that facility of geotagged photos and being able to see exactly where it is in the cemetery is beyond helpful.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Now, you've already mentioned several really interesting features that are available at Find a Grave, and there might be a few people listening who've never been to Find a grave dot com. So you've mentioned that you can upload photographs of the tombstones. There's the mapping feature. Give us a quick overview bullet list of what are some of the most important [e-mail] well, one thing I do.

[Daniel Loftus]

Enjoy with Find a Grave is actually, and it's when you're editing a memorial, if you know that there is, for instance, a husband and wife together and we'll say they're buried in the same grave, you can link their memorials together by their memorial number, which each memorial on Find a Grave is given. And you can go into the edit page, you can link memorials together. So you can do parents, you can do spouses, you can do children, you can do all of that. And I think that is one of the handy features because I've had ones where I've seen, you know, the parent may have died and will say Mayo, but the the child died in Sligo or Leitrim or somewhere else. So having that linking feature is a good way of being able to relate. Right. Who's who and where are they?

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

That's a really great point.

[Lisa Louise Cook]

I was recently researching on one of.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

The big genealogy websites and finally got the next generation person. They had a listing for their Find A Grave memorial. So I clicked it, went through, and there's their whole family. And as you said, they were all linked up, which is just a fabulous use of that technology. These are all really positive things. Now, I know you're doing do's and don'ts, so what are some of the don'ts that we should be keeping in mind as we're working with Find a Grave.

[Daniel Loftus]

Okay, I've got two major ones. So the first one is I've seen on Find a Grave whenever I've tried getting in contact with a member on Find a Grave, for whatever reason, it may be that there is no facility to contact them because they either don't have an email address listed, which you can do, or you can't actually message them because they've turned off the messaging feature. Because if you're going to the notification settings on your profile, you can choose whether or not you would like to allow your email to be publicly available for people to contact you, or you can go to the edit page on your profile to decide whether or not you want to receive messages or not. And many people that I've seen that I've tried to get in contact with for one reason or another, have both of those facilities unavailable. So the don't here is like, don't cut off, you know, people from trying to contact you because you might be able to offer them information that you are aware of. But if they can't get in contact with you, then it's not really going to facilitate collaboration or, you know, just trying to fix an error or something, which I know can be done in the Suggest Edits tab. But sometimes it might be nice to get in contact with the user directly.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

That's a great point, because really, genealogy is such a collaborative effort, isn't it?

[Daniel Loftus]

Oh, absolutely, it really is. And if you're cutting off the means of doing that collaboration, it just makes it a little more tricky. Now my other big don't, which is for It's a topic that I have brought up significantly, and it is something that I encourage people to do and that I started it back in 2021. And it's wait, don't make, because I would imagine a lot of us who have lost family, whenever the obituary does go up on the website of the funeral home or RIP or whatever site publishes obituaries, it is very common, I have noticed, for memorials to be created incredibly soon after the demise of someone. And in some cases, and in many that I've seen as of late, has been done before the person is actually buried, which is, I feel, sort of contradictory to the purpose, which is to document kind of the headstones and the graves. Now, while I realize that not everyone will have a headstone or a grave when we do add a memorial to find a grave, we are doing an effort, which we are undertaking of our own volition to Document people's history. And we have to be mindful and respectful of others, especially if someone has just passed away and the family are grieving and they are trying to, you know, focus on, you know, paying tribute to their loved ones and burying them or saying goodbye to them in whatever way they do that. If you just go and create a memorial, it does cause upset. And I have seen many of my Facebook friends, online friends, whatever they have said, you know, oh, my relative just died. I just had to go and create my relative and find a grave because I know someone else would. And it really is an unsettling aspect of findawave. I know it is not applying to the entire site, but I don't feel it would be appropriate to not mention it, considering how rife it is in some aspects and done by some users at the site where they do this practice, which some might not necessarily see an issue with it, but I would just ask, you know, to be mindful and, you know, there'll be time to add someone after, you know, they pass away. And I think it's important that whenever someone dies, you give the family that time to grieve. So if someone saw an obituary, don't immediately create a, you know, a memorial for that person. Give it time and give it a month, give it a year, give it a period of time where you just kind of think, okay, the family are just grieving. I can't, or I shouldn't really push this on the site just yet, because genealogy is personal. It's about people, and people agree differently. And it's all just about trying to be as mindful as we possibly can with it, especially when we're doing something so deeply personal. And, you know, it is a very turbulent topic as well. So I feel like just observing the. Having a modicum of respect by just trying to, you know, hang on a second. Let's not do this straight away. I'll give it some time and then add it. You know, it's just about giving people time and patience to. Or time and space to come to terms with the loss.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Do you find that many people are out there putting and creating memorials for people that they don't even know there's. Like you said, they're seeing an obituary online. Is there a lot of that that people are making them? Because I'm guessing family members, if. If that's the case, might feel like, gosh, I want to be the one who at least does that, because, like you said, it's deeply personal.

[Daniel Loftus]

Exactly. And I can't give you an estimate for how many do it. Because with the way that the site is set up for newly created memorials, you can't see who originally created it and you can only see like say for instance, my grand aunt died and I am trying to get her memorial. If I claim it as a recently deceased memorial, it actually erases who originally created it. So it doesn't necessarily give you an idea as to how many do this. So it's a case of I can't necessarily give you an exact total, but anytime that a relative of an online connection of mine who has died, they have found that this has happened to them and it is just a hard thing to watch.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. That begs the question, can anybody edit a memorial after. And can multiple edits occur over time?

[Daniel Loftus]

Yes. I mean, if you controlled a memorial, if you manage it or created it or whatnot, you can make as many changes as you want, obviously. But if it was someone who say, if John created my granddad's memorial and I wanted to suggest to John to make these edits, I can obviously file the edits with them using the suggest edits button. But I have not come across a limit of how many times you can send edits through.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

So when somebody creates a memorial, do they kind of, in a sense, they're the controlling user and any edits must go through them. Is that kind of how that works?

[Daniel Loftus]

So if they create a memorial, they can make as many changes as they want, but if someone takes it over, they lose that control. And then they would have to be the one to suggest edits because whoever took it over now is the entire control of the memorial and they can make changes themselves. So if for instance, John made my grand aunt's memorial, if I, and obviously if she's a recently deceased memorial, I can take that over and then I would get full control of the memorial, so I can make all the changes I like. And then John would have to go and suggest any edits to the memorial because he loses that control.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

That's interesting. So do you have to request to the original creator that you would like to take control of it over?

[Daniel Loftus]

If it is a recently deceased memorial, you do not have to. It is just a, like, who are you to them? And then you can just take it over.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Very interesting. Well, it sounds like being mindful of the timing and the family is all really good advice in terms of this because it does affect a lot of people. It's a fascinating website and we're really looking forward to your article coming out to help us navigate it and really get good use out of it while also being very helpful to it as well. Daniel, I know that you are the creator of Project Infant. You want to tell us real quickly what that's about?

[Daniel Loftus]

Yes. So Project Infant is a project I started back in July of 2022 where it aims record the names of those who died in institutions in and around Ireland. So industrial schools, mother and baby homes and other institutions that we come across to try and give the women and children who died in these institutions their names back.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Fascinating work. Sounds like a wonderful project. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us here on the show. I hope you'll come back again soon.

[Daniel Loftus]

Thank you so much. Lisa Foreign.

[Lisa Louise Cook]

Thanks so much for joining me for the Family Tree Magazine Best Websites Podcast. You can find a link over to this month's best [e-mail] podcast also, while you're at the website, I would encourage you to sign up for our free email newsletter. It's the perfect way to stay in touch with everything we've got going on at Family Tree Magazine, including our other podcast, the Family Tree Magazine Podcast. I'm Lisa Louise Cook and you can find me at my website, genealogygems.com where you'll find links to my Genealogy Gems podcast and our YouTube channel. Until next time, have fun climbing your Family Tree.