Find A Grave - Free Research With A Caveat

   I've entered all the information I'm going to get from my surviving Tate aunts, uncles and cousins. I've entered my father's siblings and my grandfather's siblings, at least those that my aunts and uncles still remember. Birth locations seem to be fairly easy for them to recall, but birth date questions for their aunts and uncles are greeted with a blank-eyed stare.
   I'm sure this web site is well documented somewhere, but it was a very pleasant surprise to me when it showed up in a Google search for something unrelated, FindAGrave.com.
   FindAGrave.com is a wonderful site for adding birth dates, date of death and potentially place of death with several caveats; i.e. 1) the person giving the information may not correctly remember the deceased's birth date and date of death or have access to the documents that provide them, 2) the person taking down the information might not jot down the information legibly or hear the person correctly, 3) the deceased or their family may have chosen to be cremated and therefor there will be no entry in FindAGrave.com, 4) there might not be a picture of the headstone or grave marker for your loved one in FindAGrave.com's database and 5) in the case of multiple marriages, it may not identify the person you thought would be buried along side a loved one.
   FindAGrave.com is a searchable database of potential snapshots and maybe even an obituary or list of family members. The problem comes up more often than not that there is not a snapshot of the grave marker for the person you're looking for. You can request via email that a snapshot be taken and posted or if the cemetery is close, drive over and take one to be uploaded later by you. I'm treating FindAGrave.com as a free database of places to start my search for missing dates of birth and dates of death keeping in mind its pitfalls.
   I plan to fact check these dates with census information, death certificate images and WWI or WWII Draft Card images and other sources from Ancestry.com. Of course at that point, I'll have to start subscribing to Ancestry.com so I can finally see what those little jiggling leafs are all about.

Here's a screen shot of the results so far...