Find a Grave volunteer Larry Hart went back to Union Cemetery in Panola Co., MS, and got the rest of the gravestone photos in what must have been the Conner family plot.

He emailed me to let me know, so I could create memorials for them.

Then he posted his photos.

William Henry Conner, 1808-1858, my 3rd great grandfather.

Elizabeth Curtis Conner, my 3rd great grandmother.

Henry Conner, 1874-1874, and Claudius Conner, 1876-1876, baby sons of James Alfred Conner, one of William and Elizabeth's sons.

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And then he sent me the photos he took by email.

You just don't very often run across people like Mr. Hart.

When you do, you've found a real gem.

I hope this post doesn't wind up sounding like a rant. I would only be adding to the negative energy I found this morning.

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I found a genealogy blog solely devoted to making fun of people who have errors in their published family trees.

Who among us has not found a published family tree containing our own ancestors?

And maybe contacted the owner, providing correct information, and offering to untangle some limbs?

And maybe getting no reply at all, or perhaps one that hotly defends the errors?

And maybe we blog about it. That, I get.

What I do not get is the significant investment of time and energy expended in searching out family trees unrelated to my own, looking for obvious errors and broadcasting it in a blog solely devoted to sarcastic fingerpointing.

AND failing at the same time to provide the correct information.

Because we all know that some folks just seize on a string of search results and re-publish them, compounding the error.

So what's accomplished by that?

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Of course, I have to consider where I found the link to the referenced blog.

At the Find-a-Grave forums. Where more often than not, all that's going on is negative.

I had gone there to see how far behind the cemetery fix-it thread was.

And ran across one of those discussion threads where someone with way too much time on their hands was asking...

Look at this photo and see if you think it's a post-mortem photo...you can't see a casket, but I'm just sure it's a post-mortem photo...

Because Find-a-Grave does not permit post-mortem photos on its grave records, and someone just might need to be cyber-whipped.

One commenter pointed out that the subject's eyes could have been closed when the photo was taken.

A couple of commenters tried valiantly to talk about the differences in burial and mourning rituals in other cultures, and in western US culture over history.

Then, words like creepy, jarring, physically repulsed, SCARY (caps in original), and disturbing started creeping into the comments.

And all I could think about was the wonderful work of the volunteer photographers at Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, who give modern day grieving parents a tastefully photographed portrait of their deceased child - the only one they will ever have.

I understand the rules at Find-a-Grave. But where is all the judgement coming from?

If you don't want to see a post-mortem photo, don't look.

But don't judge the family for having it.

This is for me one of the more interesting features of Find a Grave...

The online stroll, where you can use the arrow keys on the top of the random record to move back and forth through online burial records that have been submitted to the online stroll database for that purpose.

I am a big proponent of making genealogical information freely available. I intend to do that in this blog, and I try to support other online activities where the information is free.

That's one of the reasons I am such a big fan of FindaGrave.

I am not, however, a fan of the increasing politicking, nitpicking and inflated egos I find in the FAG forums though.

Particularly those that surround transferring of memorials to family members "out of guidelines."

Yes, there is a four generation "rule," (which is really two generations up and two down) that I personally ignore when I get requests for transfers of memorials to family members for decedents to whom I am not related.

I make that clear on my profile, which really chaps some of the forum members. They are the ones who hang on to the memorials they have created for dear life, and will not ever ~gasp~ transfer "out of guidelines."

They make fun of people who even ask.

Like a snippet from an ongoing thread entitled Rethinking transfers!...

The post I replied to...

I had this one ask for her GGG Father. She had created 8 memorials and managed 68. I wandered (sic) how many GGG Fathers she had.

My reply...

Well, that would probably look like this...she had two parents.
She had four grandparents.
She had eight great grandparents
She had sixteen gr-gr grandparents.
She had thirty-two gr-gr-gr grandparents.

If I understand biology correctly, half of those gr-gr-gr-grandparents were male.

So I would say she had 16 ggg grandfathers.

I cannot fathom why you would want to hold on to the management of a record for someone to whom you are not related when someone who is related wants to manage it...