Family Historian User Group

When using the Gravestone/Memorial/Monumental Inscription template, what is the date field intended to be?

I'm about to create a source for a gravestone where I've obtained the image and inscription from Find A Grave which has the death dates for seven individuals.

Also, would you set the repository as Find A Grave? I've seen a post which suggested creating a repository for each cemetery.

Is there a way to make the template generate a Short Title? With seven names and the full cemetery name and location, the title in the records - sources tab is going to be stupidly long!

I use a generic source FindAGrave, and then add the image to the citation. I also copy the details for each name on the memorial into the citation text. The citation can then be used for each individual mentioned on the memorial. I use the citation against the death event as the date given is usually the death, and not the burial. I also add a burial event to identify the burial place, and again use the citation against that - once set up, using copy/paste for the citation saves a lot of time. The burial date is usually within a week or so of the death, so the burial date I usually use is just the month. I don't use a repository for FindAGrave.

Hmmm
1) Date - given that whoever wrote that Template Definition didn't provide the hint to answer your question, I think that the only sensible answer is - whatever seems most useful to you. The Ian MacDonald book Referencing for Genealogists ... that I thought was linked to Strathclyde Uni and therefore to the Essentials templates, has a Date refering to the date of death. One obvious alternative is the date that the MI was recorded. That would seem vaguely useful to me - if it was known - given the way stones can degrade over time. The date of death would surely be more useful, particularly if you have multiple MIs for the same name but different people. But the suggested Footnotes, etc, don't even use the Date.

If it was me, I'd twist the "Principal Names" from being a simple list of names, to being a list of names and death dates, e.g.
John Griffiths (d1938); Elizabeth F Griffiths (d1960)
So those two names and dates would all go in "Principal Names" in my version.

2) Seven names? Frankly, I'd cut it off at some point - after all it's supposed to be the Principal Names, not a transcription... One could cut it off at the names of the parents, or just include the parents and grandparents, but not children. Again, the place for that level of detail is in the transcript. As an analogy, if you think about it, we tend not to record all the names in the title of a census source-record - only the householder. Well, that's what I do, and as you say, these things grow easily.

3) FindAGrave as Repository? Or the cemetery? If you were creating a source record for stones that you'd seen yourself, then Cemetery would be plausible. As it is, it sounds like the sources that you've seen are the images on FindAGrave, therefore that should be the Repository. My only question then would be whether you need both Repository and Collection ("Online data collection if any")? I'm undecided over the duplication.

For each headstone I find, I set up a new Generic Source and add the media to it. I do not add a date to the media item, as (especially for multiple burials) it does not make sense - you will find the headstone appearing half way through some of the people's lives in the media tab which looks very unusual. I then use the source for the various burials in the grave, and date each of those accordingly.

For naming, for multiple burials, I usually try and pick the "primary" person in the grave and relate to that, so for example "SMITH, Bert & Family" or "JONES, Susan & Daughters".

It doesn't answer the original question, but I take the following approach with Find a Grave:

• A separate split generic source for each distinct reference in FaG, with a Title of the form Find a Grave: Year - Name as recorded (with birth surname in parentheses), Location.
• Publication Info is the web url.
• No Repository - they are all FaG, so the field is redundant in this case. It's not "wrong" to include it, but I don't see the need.
• Text from Source is copied directly from the FaG entry, pasted as plain text, then automatically formatted into a two-column table with one click using a custom plugin (you could also use the Store plugin for a split source like this, but it's slower and more clicks).
• One media record per grave, with images attached, linked to the individual sources. Irritatingly, FaG seems to save most images as *.jpeg, so I save them in a common name format identifying who is buried and where, with a .jpg extension for consistency.
• If there is an image of the headstone with a precise death date, I take that as the individual's date of death (but is not always 100% reliable in my experience!), and burial date as approximate, so "died 3 May 1932, buried c. May 1932". Place of burial is the memorial stone location, unless there is evidence the actual burial was elsewhere. This may be incorrect occasionally, but like most of our records, it is the "most likely" version of the fact, not necessarily proven beyond reasonable doubt.
• If there is no image, or the image does not state a precise death date, I apply case-by-case judgement whether it is more likely to be a death or burial date, but always state the ambiguity in the fact note. In my experience, a lot of FaG entries with no image seem to have been mass-copied from other sites (usually cemetery records), so the quoted date is more likely to be burial than death.

Mark1834 wrote: ↑

01 Oct 2022 08:26

In my experience, a lot of FaG entries with no image seem to have been mass-copied from other sites (usually cemetery records), so the quoted date is more likely to be burial than death.

You're right of course, but I would go further. A lot of information that appears to be from the picture is actually user-generated and irritatingly often does not correspond to what is on the headstone (which is not, as you note, always correct). The entries with no images are either mass-copied or entered by enthusiastic tree-builders and I treat the data as I do from, for example, Ancestry Trees - that is, with suspicion.

I add the gravestone image under burial fact
Victor