This week Ted Bainbridge provides a helpful outline of the changes coming to the Find-A-Grave website, one of the family of Ancestry resources. You can preview the proposed new site, while access to the old is presently being maintained.

Find-a Grave will change

Findagrave.com has announced that the web site soon will change. Some changes are cosmetic, while others are functional. A map feature has been added.

The home page, formerly just a list of over thirty choices, will become a photograph with a few menu selections across the top. That page will be dominated by the search panel, which will function largely as it has in the past and with the same options for every search box except those related to location.

The current search panel specifies location via pull-down lists for country, state, and county. The new search panel offers a single box for location, in which you are supposed to type the name of a place. As you begin to type a city, county, state, or country that box auto-fills with suggested place names which you can select with a mouse click. Use the American English equivalent of a country name; Germany works but Deutschland doesn’t.

The new home page’s menu bar goes across the top of the screen. Clicking CEMETERIES takes you to a page that lets you hunt cemeteries in either of two ways. Near the top left of the page is a search box where you can type a cemetery name. This auto-fill box works as above. When you select a name, you see a hit list of cemeteries with that name. Each entry on the hit list displays some facts about that cemetery, and a link to its information page. That page contains a search box that you can use to hunt for a person’s name.

Instead of using that cemetery-name search box, you can use the cemetery-place search box to its right. Clicking a place name produces a map of cemeteries near that place. You can zoom the map in or out, and can pan it in any direction. (If the map doesn’t display any marker pins, zoom in.) After a name is in that search box, clicking Search leads to a hit list of cemeteries near that place. Use this hit list the same way you use the other cemetery search box.

To see and experiment with all the planned changes, go to https://www.findagrave.com/ and then click preview now near the top center of the screen.

Ted Bainbridge, PhD

***