What a way to get the news of her passing!

That is strange. You think someone might have called youo before they went online.

That's the deal. We have a private family Facebook page. It hasn't been posted there yet. It was not unexpected that this great aunt died. The whole family hadn't been notified yet. Granted most people would not be looking at Find A Grave. I don't think the person who made the memorial is related to my great aunt. The contributor has nearly 60,000 memorials. I can appreciate the hobby and helping others, but that is quite a high number of memorials.

Anyway, it was huh? moment for me.

Yeah, that's a little weird. I never would have guessed that a memorial would be published on Find A Grave so quickly, even before the whole family would know. Apparently that contributor doesn't waste any time.

Are you sure you didn't happen onto the Grim Reaper's checklist?

There are people who do this memorial creating as a hobby and use obituaries as the source. They do not know the person or family, never visit the cemeteries and may do so from thousands of miles away. Some use virtual cemeteries online to create memorials. Find A Grave has a policy that if a direct descendant of the person named in the memorial within 4 generations wants to be "owner" of that memorial then the creator has to grant the request. In other words, child, parent, grandparent, great grandparent of deceased has the right to ask for a transfer of the memorial to you. Of course you have to join Find a Grave to do so, but that isn't hard to do and you don't have to add any other memorials of your own. I have had mostly positive experiences getting people to transfer memorials to me of family members, even those not as closely related. Only twice have people refused to do - once for an Aunt in law of my husband and once for a cousin of mine. If you get it transferred, you can add your own additional family information that this creator may not know about. Unfortunately, your Great Aunt isn't in the direct line so it would be at the creator's kindness to transfer it to you.

I'm not interested in taking over that particular memorial. I had only met my great aunt two or three times. She lived too far away for me to get to know her real well. I knew more about her from other relatives. I was actually looking at FAG for my dd to show her that her middle name has been passed down from at least four other generations.

I only have seven memorials under my name. Those are a set of grandparents, a set of great-grandparents and then then some relatives that died as babies or didn't have any direct descendants. I'm still working on biographies for them. I've realized no one else will probably have the information and interest to record it. I'm writing what I can. I try not to do just names and dates. I'm including the family lore and recording it as such. People do look at it with interest.

I went to a family reunion last month. Someone showed up with their genealogy research information. It kept looking really familiar to me. Then they pulled out the FAG biography I had written for my great grandfather and some birth, death, etc., documents I had found and paid to get twenty years ago. Some had notations in my handwriting. This individual had my great grandmother's bible and a few official documents I'd never seen. My cell phone has a good camera so I was able to get good pictures and pass them on to my dadand his siblings through email. I filled in a few blanks I've had.