Endless Thread - Find A Grave: Social Media Icon

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

Host Ben Brock Johnson and producer Quincy Walters go to an historic Boston cemetery to try out findagrave.com — a volunteer-generated database of millions of graves throughout the world. At the cemetery, Ben and Quincy have a hard time finding anyone who's ever heard of the site that's been around since 1995. Despite this, Quincy makes the argument that Find a Grave is one of the first social media sites that doesn't get the respect it deserves. "But how is it social media if no one knows about it?" Ben asks. Then the pair encounter a veteran user of the site. After that, they get ahold of the guy who started Find a Grave. Does he think Find a Grave is social media? Find out in this episode of Endless Thread. 

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Hello, Emery. Hello, Ben. Are you carving pumpkins?

I just had some dried mango. That's not scary. Dried mango's not scary. Oh, I'm sorry. Pumpkin's not scary either. That's true. If you want, you can pretend that instead of like mango leather, it was human leather. Oh. I take it too far.

Especially creepy for a vegan to throw out there. I like it. I like it. Vegans can eat other vegans. We just don't eat other species. Only for the month of October, which, as it happens, is endless dread months. We've got four stories coming your way Actually more than four I think We've got you know five or six coming your way A whole bushel of stories A bushel of creepy tales for you

Yeah we're excited to play them for you This first one is you know it's not Terrifying But it does involve graves Can you even handle it? Dead dead dead dead people. All right. Well, enjoy this first installment of Endless Dread. And keep listening. We're going to get spooky. Testing, one, two, three, testing, testing. All right, I'm recording.

All right. I have a question for you. Quincy. All right. All right. So it's 8.30 in the morning. Thursday, producer Quincy Walters and I are saddling up in the trusty Endless Threadmobile at 2012 Toyota Rav 4. very reliable, sensible vehicle. And we are heading to a cemetery. Is it okay if we go to a famous person's grave? Sure. Who's grave? I'll tell you when we get there.

Okay. Is it a person, a recently famous person? That's a tough question to answer. Is it Samuel Adams? That was a really good guess. It's Samuel Adams. Is it really? Yes.

Oh, okay. Well then, that's fine. Because my family is related to Samuel Adams. What? Okay. Wow. Oh, man. That was like a magical... How did you do that? I don't know how you did that. I've been on a few tours of Boston, and without fail, they'll point to the Bean Town Pub downtown and then to the cemetery across the street. And they always say it's the only place in the world where you can drink. an ice cold Samuel Adams while looking across the street

at an ice cold Samuel Adams. Oh, that's really. That was pretty good. I like that. I appreciate that. It's a bad joke. But in retrospect, I'm realizing it was kind of insensitive of me to joke

about your family member who passed away. What do you mean? The ice cold Samuel Adams. Ah, Quincy, it's okay. several generations since my relative Sam Adams. Okay. So it's totally fine. So we went to downtown Boston to the granary burying grounds, which, you know,

granaries and places where you're burying dead bodies sounds like a bad combination to me. If we're talking about storing grain, I don't know. And then the board had helped an investigation, and they discovered there are, the fluids from the bodies were going, why didn't we have breaking water? That is a colonial reenactor talking about. about how in days of your fluids from dead bodies were in the drinking water. I mean, you said it. Burying the dead with the food was a choice. You found a heck of a grave been.

Well, we haven't found it yet exactly. It's a very old and famous graveyard. John Hancock, Paul Revere, James Otis, Samuel Adams. The night before, for the first time in my life, I went to findagrave.com. It's this website that came about in 1995, OG. Gosh, what is that? What is 1995 internet?

E-bombs world? Aim chat? What does 1995 internet look like? And basically, Find a Grave is a directory of cemeteries across the world generated pretty much entirely by volunteers. I was talking to my mom. And she was basically, I was like, who from our family might be buried around here? And she was like, well, there's this guy, you know, Charles McFeeders, but he put an A into our name.

So I don't know if, like, you'll be able to find him. Oh, man. And then Ben typed it in with an A and bada-bbing. Just like that. I put that A in, on Find a Grave. I turned into Mac Featers. And we found him. Oh, wow.

And his wife was buried there too, so I knew Gertrude. Then I typed in Great, Great, Great, Great, Grand, something or other, Samuel Adams' name. And Bada Boom! There was information on where the grave is located and several pictures of it. But pictures can only help us out so much. How many podcasters does it take to find a grave? Oh, man. Stay tuned, and you're going to find out.

In this episode, we're going to dig into this website. that's been around since the infancy of the World Wide Web that no one seems to know about. And I'm going to make the case that findagrave.com should be considered a paragon of early social media. I'm Quincy Walters. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. How is it social media if no one knows about it? Oh, well, you're listening to endless thread. Well, it's an oft-unrecognized platform that predates you twit face or tick vine or snap reel. Hey, maybe someone you know is already on it.

coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Today's episode, Find a Grave, social media icon. All right, so Quincy and I are back in Granary Cemetery in downtown Boston looking for Samuel Adams' plot. And we are going based off of some pictures from findagrave.com. I think one of these images is from Find a Grave. Okay. It's a real pretty...

scraggly looking stone here. There's a brown building directly behind it. Yeah, in the white building too. Let's just say grainary cemetery is kind of a mess in some parts. Jumbled up headstones and most of them are unreadable.

Grainery and cemetery just don't go together, I guess, Quincy. But cemeteries and the internet Ben, that's a different story. The first and most important fact that qualifies find a grave as social media is, it's an online platform used by a vast amount of people.

Do you think findagrave.com is a form of social media? I don't think so. Yeah, well, I know so, and I'm going to prove it. The first and most important fact that qualifies Find a Grave as social media is it's an online platform used by a vast amount of people. Have you ever heard of that website? No, I haven't, but it's interesting, Find a Grave. Yikes, man. Quincy, it's not looking great.

Okay, but by the end of this episode, you'll learn about Find a Grave if you're not already familiar with it, and you'll be correctly convinced that it's social media. Excuse me. Have you ever heard of Findagrave.com? No, okay. All right. Okay, all right. Okay, Quincy, it seems like your first contention about it being broadly used is falling apart, man. Anyway, if you guess that it takes two podcasters to find a grave, you'd be right. All right, here it is.

There you go. Samuel Adams. Okay, I see a lot of change thrown at the base of this grave. I see a bunch of little rocks. I see a Sam Adams beer cap. That almost seems like it's purposefully, like, placed. Here lies buried Samuel Adams, signer of the Declaration of Independence, governor of this Commonwealth, a leader of men.

and an ardent patriot. It's nice to be able to visit a relative. Hmm. All right. All right. That was a nice moment. Okay. Let's go find that guy in the cap back there and see what he's doing.

So in the span of time, it takes two podcasters to find a single grave. There's a dude in the back of the cemetery who looks like he's strategically going to multiple graves, maybe checking them off of a list. There's a guy back there who has a little. Like a clipboard. I wonder. Or a notepad. I wonder what he's doing.

From my observations of Find a Grave users, there are a lot of people of retirement age, but the guy with the clipboard looks really young. He's kneeling down and taking pictures of headstones. He's got a beige red socks cap on, polo shirt tucked into jeans, the kind of guy who sticks out by how much he blends in. Yeah, he's really,

going to work. He might work here. Or... He might be a find-a-graver. I couldn't help but notice you kind of like taking pictures and writing things down. Have you heard of findagrave.com? Do you use...

You are. You are. Okay. Man, we were psyched to find 22-year-old Jeremy Barry, who, as he said, is very active on Find a Grave. even though he's only 22, he could be considered a Find a Grave veteran and super user. And it's such a coincidence that we've found him at this time of day.

I mean, what are the odds? His day job is as an archivist for a town in Massachusetts. So that tipped the odds in our favor. But he's been doing Find a Grave longer than he's had that job. And how long have you been doing it? Probably since I was about 10 or 12. Wow. Wow. You've been doing it for 12 years?

Yeah. Wow. I think part of the fun of it to me is that every time I track down a relative in a cemetery, there's always going to, people are buried together, and you always find things you don't expect to that help fill in the gaps because they're buried in family plots. Okay, so Jeremy is proof that people do use this platform. But it is worth mentioning that Jeremy isn't just any old find a graver.

He was named Volunteer of the Month six months ago. I think the whole thing is just a lot. Very exciting, but I'm biased because I work as an archivist and conservators, so I'm immersed in history all the time. So this is not so far out of my interests. And this is the part in the argument, Quincy, where you back all this up with hard numbers, right? But as I understand it, you've been in a sort of unfruitful back and forth with Find a Grave for almost two months? Yeah, actually, I've been given the runaround by Ancestry.com,

that big genealogy site that has those poignant commercial. I guess is how you would define them. Improving everything we do to serve you better. Because your family's story has always been our priority. Because they purchased Find a Grave back in 2013. Anyway, everyone... It's like Facebook buys Instagram, Ancestry buys Find a grade. Exactly. Hey, it repeats itself.

If it quacks like a social media platform. Anyway, everyone was on vacation, then somebody was on maternity. leave, I spoke to one journalist who said, good luck getting those numbers, but Ben? Yes, Quincy? They don't call me Quincy Walters' PI podcast investigator for nothing. Take a look at these numbers I was able to squeeze out of them. All right, they've got six to seven million unique visitors a month, Quincy, not too amazing, not too shabby. Tens of thousands of unique contributors a month, okay, okay. Which is.

a lot. Not exactly a number, though. And you also apparently tried to get people from a Facebook group to talk to you, and then you got kicked out of it. Unless we bring that up, Ben. But, yeah, there's a Facebook group that a lot of people troubleshoot things on with the site. Okay. I was initially accepted in the group and, you know, told them my intentions.

Then I got ignored, then kicked out after I started. reaching out to some people. But here are some more numbers. 226 million digital memorials have been created on Find a Grave since it began in 1995, and it's used in 248 countries. Okay, not to interrupt you, Quincy, but does Jeremy even think Find a Grave is social media?

I don't think so, because most of, I think of it as a digital repository to host all of the images and documentations updates on things. You have a photo perhaps taken in 1991 in 2005. People upload various things and you can see the status of something over time. It's a repository for information about the stones. Okay.

I wasn't expecting Jeremy to make my point for me, but a digital repository that hosts images and updates and statuses and documents and things is like the most eloquent way to concede that. find a grave is social media. I mean, come on, court dismissed. Bring in the dancing lobstas. I don't think Ben understands that reference, but if you're a certain age, you do. I'll take it. And that brings us to my second contention. It has democratic content sharing. Users create a profile. They can upload a profile picture. They can post graves and direct message each other. There's even a form for it. Okay. All right. This all sounds promising.

You know, updating people's statuses to dead. I get it. I guess it's all about how you use the site, though, right? So Jeremy says he uses it because he's really into genealogy and being a historian of sorts for his family. Plus, he says it's a family hobby. It's myself and my mother who both... I'm on the East Coast, she's in California,

and we both fulfill photo requests for people. I've fulfilled probably about 5,500 photo... requests for people. Okay, maybe it's a family hobby for him, but this leads to my third point. Find a grave connects people like Jeremy and his mom and some of his genealogy friends, but it connects people in other ways, right? You heard him say that he fulfills photo requests? Yeah, what does that mean exactly?

Okay, so let's say you're trying to find out where exactly a relative is buried. Maybe all you know is that they're buried in a particular state or city. You push a button that says, I'd like to see a photo of the headstone if it's not already there. An email goes out to all of our contributors that live near that cemetery. And usually within like a day, maybe a week, you'll get an email back saying that photo's been taken and posted to find a grave. And it's one of the most... This is the founder, Jim Tipton, on the Extreme Genes radio show back in 2013. Oh, ever Christmas, we visit my Uncle Fred in prison.

Wow. That theme music, just wow. Yeah, it is sensory overload in a way. But we managed to get a hold of Jim at the last minute, and it was kind of like a Wizard of Oz moment. Oh, really? Okay, well, you peel back the curtain, and here I am. In all my disappointing non-glory. Well, you know, to be honest, I don't do, I haven't talked with, I used to do like radio and just, you know, newspapers and just interviews every so often. It's just part of running this site.

And I don't do it very often anymore. So it's kind of, I'm a little rusty, I suppose. But it's, it's kind of nice to talk about it again. So far so good, Jim. Jim Tipton founded Find a Grave back in the 90s. because he's a self-described insomniac who wanted to teach himself HTML. And he said the photo request function is by far his favorite part of it. Because connections, you know, seeing that name etched in stone has a lot more gravity to it

than just simply seeing the name typed down on the screen. So it works tremendously well. It's got like an 82% overall success rate. Wow. So let's get back to Super Find a Graver, Jeremy. In addition to Jeremy and his mom fulfilling these photo requests to people, Jeremy also creates digital memorials on his own. On Find a Grave, these users, called memorial managers,

often end up as sort of digital caretakers, undertakers of larger numbers of graves. So that's a really interesting thing. I manage about 100,000 memorials and we're just shy of. And I have created them in bulk. I go through, I get freedom of information law requests from different towns, get massive lists of the cemeteries, and some of that I've contributed to find a grave over the years. And he sees this as a service.

Yeah, because he thinks it's important that people be remembered. Up next, Jeremy throws shade on some graves in certain states, and a final ruling on whether find a grave is the OG social media site. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing. Or politics.

Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab. Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know.

Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice, beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Location, location, location. That's the incantation of realtors. They say it's the most important thing in real estate, and cemeteries

aren't exempt from this. Jeremy says the quality of the cemetery depends on where it is geographically. For instance, in the state of Rhode Island, for example, all the cemeteries are clearly marked with distinct signs. You cross two minutes over into Connecticut, and they're all in people's backyards, there's no signage, the state has no help in locating them. So a lot of the local politics really have a lot to do with it. And the ones that are in more sparsely popular, populated areas get a lot less help and attention. So he sees find a grave as a way to tidily remember someone if their resting place is a little dilapidated.

And the site has been around so long that Jeremy finds himself re-uploading new pictures of cemeteries already online because pictures posted a long time ago may be grainy from a film camera or have the heavy pixelation from an old digital camera or someone's thumb in the way. And since he grew up with the internet while also having this old-fashioned hobby, he's the perfect person to do this kind of thing.

A lot of the ones I photograph have already been... There are already images online, but they're so low resolution that if you zoom in to read the text and what does that say, you can't read a word of it. You just see the outline of the stone. Wow, you're really... Yeah, you're really... I feel like it's a service that you're providing.

And it seems like you do it freely, but it's interesting, too, that ancestry presumably profits off of it. Yeah, it didn't used to be that way, so it's a shame. You know, it was the guy who founded it, who lived in Utah in the early 2000s, and I think it's a great shame that it was bought by ancestry, because in a lot of ways that kind of defeated the purpose. Jeremy's not the only find-a-grave user left with a slight sour taste after the acquisition, but Ancestries purchase could reinforce my first contention that a lot of people use the site. Here's Jim on that genealogy radio show. When it came to actually building out the site, it was still just me.

It was just way too big to keep going in that manner. And I realized that being behind because I basically couldn't keep up. And to try to kind of find a solution, I realized it had to get bigger. And one way to do that was to work with ancestry. But I mean, also ancestry fared well in the deal because ancestry has acquired a volunteer-generated database of millions of graves, which definitely helps with its genealogy side of the business. And the thing is, find a grave founder, Jim Tipton, says it was never intended to be this broadly used thing when it came on the scene. in 1995. And I put up a web page like some people were doing in those early days of the internet.

And I was into visiting famous graves. I went up and visited Al Capone's grave, was one of the first famous ones I visited. And I just had maybe a hundred listings that I'd kind of gotten from reading biographies and things. There really weren't that many websites. So people were kind of checking out any new website at the time. And people started sending me, like, you've got to have Elvis on that list.

started sending me, oh, you know, Marilyn Monroe needs to be on there. And again, this was just famous names initially. If you want your social media company to be successful, Quincy, you got to recruit some celebrities to get on there, right? Absolutely. I can tell you're warming up to my theory, Ben. And gradually, people started putting their favorite celebrities on the site. Talking to us, Jim said there's just something about being near a famous person's resting place. Then people started putting relatives on the site to memorialize them in what could be a more permanent way than

stone, which is online, and if you concede that find a grave is social media, perhaps it's the most democratic of all. It's a digital space that's for the living, as much as it is for the dead. It's a whole online ecosystem with

family historians like Jeremy, genealogists, and power-hungry clout chasers. Everyone knows what a memorial collector is within Find a Grave because there's people that just want to have a high count to look like they've done a lot, but really they're just taking on memorials, not updating them and just having their name on it. A common thing with Find a grave is that a family member of the deceased will contact a memorial manager, asking them to take the digital grave down for the sake of privacy

or for the sake of healing or maybe for the sake of the sanctity of the death of a family member. And to find a grave memorial manager could either take it down, transfer ownership, or ignore the family's wishes entirely and keep it up online. I'm not a memorial collector on there, so if somebody contacts and says it's my, you know, 10th cousin twice removed and they want to work with the memorial and do stuff on it, I'll happily transfer it to them. But a lot of people don't do that, which is unfortunate. Here's a comment from a find a grave forum from a user called I Am Better Than You, from Chicago. I know, right? Already off to a good start.

As many have said, if you don't want a photo of a loved one's headstone online, do not get one. Do not list a... Whoa, like, don't, don't get a headstone, Quincy? Is that what they're saying?

Yeah. Wow. I know. Do not list an obituary either. Make it so your family member never existed so you can go on life trying to never think of them again and wipe them from

the annals of existence. Or they recommend going into the woods like the Unabomber. And it's very, you know, it's very hyperbolic. And like this last, their last sentence kind of throws everything out of whack. But they finish up by saying there are indeed some power-tripping idiots on the site that overzealously guard entries that belong in the hands of others. Wow. It sounds like they're telling on themselves.

Wow. Wild. Wild. But, and no offense, Ben, I know that technically we did search for your ice cold relative, Samuel Adams. I really did want to hear from a regular person who came to find a grave as a relative and everyday person. So I found Katie Wallman, a Baltimore-based writer and professor who back in 2019 got a phone call. It was my sister. She was showing her fiancé at the time where my grandmother, was from, like her hometown. And so she Googled her

and her hometown. And Find a Grave was like the first result. And she was like, what is this? Up until that point, Katie had never heard of Find a Grave. It had info about where her grandmother was born and there were pictures and details she and her sister didn't know about. She wrote, quote, my grandmother in death was more popular online than she'd ever been in life. She ended up doing a deep dive into the Find a Grave ecosystem.

She wanted to know the likelihood of her getting ownership of her grandmother's digital memorial. She said she encountered good users, people like Jeremy, and there were also the memorial collectors. Definitely in it for the competition, definitely wanting to have the most, you know, the one user I spoke to who at that time was the top contributor. he had, you know, over three million graves that he had created on Find a Grave. I don't see how anyone would have time to do that. Yeah, me either. I barely have time to tie my shoe. But she said some will go to far-flung regions for the sole purpose of documenting a grave that's not on the site yet.

Katie talked to a couple of these memorial collectors, and it seems they get swamped as the adage goes. more graves, more problems. He was pretty proud of that. And he also said, you know, because he was the owner of so many, he got, he gets a lot of requests from people to, you know, change information, to transfer ownership, to link, you can link memorials, you know, if they're, if they're part of the same family, that type of thing. This all reminds me of like Pokemon, Quincy. I know, you got to catch them all. But luckily, Katie says the person who managed her grandmother's memorial wasn't one of those people. He was more like Jeremy.

I would say he really was like just sort of the best example of what a fine degree of user could be. He really seemed committed to just documenting. And he was also really meticulous about going through records and making sure that things were accurate. You know, he would reference like the Social Security Index. That was a couple of years ago. So how is managing her grandmother's digital memorial been? Has she been a meticulous digital grave manager? That's a good question.

I haven't checked in a long time. I am not a very responsible digital grave caretaker. Yeah, I think that I'm still technically the owner and caretaker of her grave. Let's go back to the Granary Cemetery in Boston, where a father-daughter duo is visiting from South Carolina, and saying they're not familiar with Find a Grave, but they're interested in it, because they're really into family history. The dad says they've traced some of their lineage, but they don't know specifically where people are buried. He didn't want to be in this story, but daughter Jordan Anderson says she's been interested in

using a tool like Find a Grave. He's being modest. Like, we have familial ties in Virginia, like founding people like. Radford University was named after my family, and that's where his family kind of migrated down to South Carolina from there. So that's kind of us in our background. So that would definitely be cool to look up those folks and see where they might be in Virginia. So, yeah.

The landscape of Find a Grave has changed over the years. Of course, the advent of the digital camera massively increased the hobby. used to shoot film and then have to scan it and it was kind of a painful process. But the heart of the site remains the same. As for Findegraib's founder, Jim, he says even though he doesn't helm the site, he'll always use it.

But yeah, I still love to be a cemetery tourist. And I kind of enjoy it even more now that I'm not thinking like, you know, oh, there's that stupid bug again. I've got to fix that. It's hanging over my, hanging over my head or whatever. Earlier we heard Jeremy say he doesn't think Find a Grave is a form of social media. He says it's a repository. But what is social media, if not a digital repository of ourselves?

Hmm. Yeah, living online memorials. Oh my God, who writes this stuff? You write it, Quincy. You write it. Would you want somebody to put you on Find a Grave? Yeah. so long as one of my own relatives managed the memorial. Jeremy, like most of us, wants to be remembered.

Not necessarily by the masses, but by the people who matter. And hey, maybe someone in Silicon Valley saw find a grave back in the 90s and thought, huh, that's something the living should have too. And I'm curious to know what your thoughts of this are. But in sort of the episode, I try to make the argument that finding, to grave is probably one of the earliest examples of social media. Do you think that's true or? Yes.

I absolutely do. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Today's episode was produced by me, Quincy Walters. And co-hosted by Quincy and me, Ben Brock Johnson. A far from deadly mix by sound designer Matt Reed. The rest of our team is Sumitajee, Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Paul Bikas, Emery Sieverton and Emily Jankowski. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between a status update and an ice-cold Samuel Adams.

If you have an untold history and unsolved mystery or a wild story you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR.org.