Searching Find A Grave
I am a big fan of Find A Grave and have found a lot of very helpful information doing searches on the site. However, I did encounter an interesting feature of the site while doing a search today. I was searching for my gggrandfather's grave at St. Frederick's Cemetery in Manito, Illinois. I know he is buried there because I have been there and photographed his headstone. What I learned is that sometimes less is better than more. When I put in his name, year of birth, year of death, and State and County of burial; I didn't get any results for the search. However, when I just put the O'Malley surname with the State and County of burial the information came up for Peter, his wife, Julia, and their daughter and her family. I later learned that the reason was that I had put date of birth as 1835 vice 1837, which is what is on the headstone and in the data base. Thus, even thought I had everything correct except the date of birth--the search was unsuccessful. I also checked and had not indicated it was an "exact" search. I would have expected that the search algorithm would allow a little leeway for the date of death or birth. Apparently not! I repeated the searches a couple times just to confirm my results. I will contact Find A Grave with this and let you know what they say.
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