Thursday, January 2, 2014

Find A Grave Changes in Suggested Edits

Copyright 2014, CABS for Reflections From the Fence

If you are a participant in the web site Find A Grave you may or may not know that they have made some changes in suggested edits, otherwise known as SAC (suggest a correction).

Instead of now typing a long message to the person managing the memorial with suggested changes, now when you click "EDIT", you will find these choices,


Clicking on "correction/addition to Birth/death date, birth/death place" will take you to this screen (note I just chose a random name to force screens with, that said, I need to review Abram's memorial, he may be a distant cousin).


Make your suggestion and submit.  The "Name", "Plot or GPS", and "Marker transcription" suggestions take you to  similar screens.

The "Suggest any other correction or addition" button takes you to a familiar screen:


Fill in as you have in the past, and send the message.

Suggestions are now going to your profile/contributor page.  It is not crystal clear if the "other" suggestions will feed to your profile page or not.  The name, dates, GPS and marker types of changes appear to be currently feeding into your profile page.

Go take a look at your profile page, the top you will now see an EDIT tab, click on it.

Now, here is the deal, I had a Edit request and I neglected to take screen shots of it. Yep, DUH.  However, you will either find a suggestion there or not!  When you find one, it is fairly obvious what to do, and you have choices to accept the suggestion, or not.

So, what I did to give you a bit of a visual is to bring up "Edits sent to me that I approved".  This is a name change request.  Another contributor discovered that Sebra's given name was really Samuel.  I decided to accept the change and clicked to indicate that.  The change was done FOR me!  All I had to do was accept the suggestion.


Now, I have heard that after 30 days, if you do not accept or deny the suggested changes that this system may just do the changes for you.  Don't stroke out on me, the messenger.  Not trusting a "rumor mill" type bit of information,  I took a quick read of the FAQ hints/page, and finally found this question:

"What is the new Edit tab on my contributor page?"

Upon reading, I found part of the answer as to what happens if you do NOT make or deny the correction:

"As part of the time-limit feature, contributors who have edits in their queue for a certain number of days will receive an email notification about the pending edits waiting review."

So, hopefully, the system is working correctly and you will receive an email just like you used to.

I can tell you that this change started at least by December 12th of 2013, check the date on my suggestion above.  I did not discover the Edit tab till after Christmas.

Changes are always happening to the web pages and sites we use.  Good, bad or indifferent, they happen.

The disclaimer is here:  I use FAG, on a volunteer basis.  They did not ask me to review or blog about this change.  I will let you decide if it is good or not.  I am only reporting it so that you are aware and can take appropriate action.  FAG was recently purchased by Ancestry.com.  I am a paying subscriber to that service.  They did not ask me to review or blog about this change either.  Further questions about this disclaimer stuff, please see my page, here.

Now after all that silliness, required by law, go have a look at your profile page and might I suggest, that you may need to do that on a regularly scheduled basis.  I think I shall add it to my weekly "to do list".

Good luck and happy graving - -





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3 comments:

Greta Koehl said...

I love the change - it will make life much easier both for both parties.

A Lindler said...

What happens if the original "owner" of the entry is dead?

Carol said...

A Lindler.

Thanks for reading.

First, please note this blog post is from 2014. It still describes the process, basically.

IF I thought the memorial holder was deceased and no one else has absorbed the memorial into their holdings I think I would direct my suggestion to staff at Find A Grave. By looking around on the main site you should find some contact information.

Good luck in your research and thank you for helping researchers at Find A Grave.