Have your Ancestors records been Hijacked by unknown Researchers/Writers on “Find a Grave”?

While there is a lot more family history research material online and sites, there are problems and one cannot just grab a tree, or a “memorial” add it/them to one’s own tree and then spread it as fact without checking the accuracy of what is online–the documentation for the claims about the memorials, persons in trees, etc..  I’ve had several instances of finding “Memorials” in Find a Grave that were very fouled up.  In one instance both the maiden surname for the person and the cemetery were wrong.  The cemetery in which someone stated this ancestress was interred didn’t exist at the time of the interment and she was really in another cemetery, and her maiden name was well known by descendants–whom the person creating the memorial never consulted.  In others, parents are regularly misidentified, again usually without consulting descendants, or easy to find online records. The latest incident comes only a year after my husband and I updated his family history and joined in a reunion of the hundreds of this Irish lady’s descendants, including her spouse.  Not one of these dozens of her descendants was consulted, before a memorial of their grandmother was hijacked and placed in a Find a Grave family group utterly unrelated to her and her family. 

Here is now, as a cautionary example, a typical Find a Grave mess created by unknown persons, who apparently have no sense of propriety, logic, general history or sociology and didn’t bother to even read the obituary to which they attached my husband Tony’s grandparents. The obituary itself didn’t include my husband’s grandparents as relatives of the deceased, but there, for anyone to see, are my husband’s grandparents incorrect records in a very public, widely used and widely seen website, attached to an unrelated family, even though the accurate facts were in the attached obituary.

Very careless and very wrong on so many levels!

It turned out, also, that my husband’s cousin, who once put the picture of the grandparents’ gravestones on Find a Grave with the basic data of births and deaths about them and children, was also no longer the manager of the “memorial,” Management of the memorial had somehow been acquired by someone else, not related, and only the new manager could correct what he had just done.  At least Find a Grave allows one to send messages to these “Memorial Managers”–if you first subscribe as a user/member of the site, and they can collect data about you to some extent. I did contact the current manager, complained and showed citations of documents correcting his mistakes and he has promised to correct what he did.  We’ll see. I’ll check it in another few days.  However, had this new “manager” done just a little very basic reading and research, very little, this mess wouldn’t have happened.  

Also, what happened to this poor Irish lady can happen again and to others. If you have ancestors who have memorials online at “Find a Grave”– you too must check those memorials from time to time to ensure your ancestors’ records aren’t hijacked and attached to unrelated families.

Here is the story of the real people involved, and what happened.

Mary Catherine McInerny (original spelling of her original surname) was born July 6, 1872 at Locust Gap, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania and baptized July 14, at St. Edward’s Catholic Church in Shamokin, the larger nearest town to the coal mining village where Mary Catherine was actually born, in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania.  The baptismal records for her and several siblings existed, but were not online.  The Catholic church has them in their own archdiocese archives.  To get most Catholic records for one’s family, you either have to go to the church–if it still exists, or contact the archdiocese archives, where records are to be sent upon church closures, etc.  However, Mary Catherine was also in the 1880 census, which is online, with her parents and some siblings. Several of her family died between 1870 and 1880 and one more after 1880.    Her father, Michael, died in Locust Gap, and there was a record of the injury that ultimately killed him which gave his name, and where the injury happened–consistent with the census records and family memories and records. Some of his family members who were witnesses to the man’s injury and death, were still alive when a grand-daughter began interviewing them and taking notes. According to her notes, what happened to Michael McInerny was that a large piece of slate with sharp edges fell from the “roof” of the tunnel where he was working and “nearly severed his hand” from his arm. This injury became infected, and he had black lung disease already. He died in 1881, and because he was a poor Irish miner, the other miners had to push the church, and its pastor, Fr. Joseph Koch, to bury him. When he was finally buried at St. Edward’s, it was in an unmarked grave, among many other Irish miners treated similarly, in what is now generally marked and indicated as “the old Irish section” of St. Edward’s cemetery. 

Three more siblings of Mary Catherine, also died at Locust Gap and were also interred at St. Edward’s, John, Henrietta and Jane, and there was mentioned a fourth child, an infant daughter born stillborn and interred there also.  5 members of the family were all interred at St. Edward’s in unmarked graves, but remembered by Maryann Coyne-Langford-McInerny-Neubauer-Kennedy (she was married four times but had children only by her second husband) and Mary Catherine, her daughter, and both were interviewed by one of Mary Catherine’s older daughters while the two women who were eyewitnesses were still alive and had good memories.  I also now have a letter from the archdiocese archives with an apology for the poor treatment of the family and the Irish in general of the area, and the correlated poor record-keeping.  Baptismal and marriage records exist, but not burial records, and one baptismal record is also missing, for Mary Catherine’s youngest sister because it was at a “mission chapel” at Locust Gap and associated with and under the supervision of St. Edward’s and Fr. Joseph Koch who didn’t give a damn about the Irish and the little mission chapel at Locust Gap that had been established well after the village was founded. 

Joseph Patrick McInerny, the only surviving son, of Michael, was  born at Preston near Liverpool March 25, 1863 and died in Lincoln County, Oklahoma in 1952 (interred with wife and several children, etc. at “White Dove Cemetery”) was the only surviving son and “the man of the family” when his father died, when Joseph was just 19.  He had zero intention of working in the mines after all of this, and when the family did receive some sort of payment connected with the father’s injury and death, took his widowed mother and surviving siblings to Minnesota to homestead there, in 1883. The young Joseph, only 19 when his father died,  had made a friend of George Neubauer Jr. whose father, George Sr. was already in Minnesota, near Watkins, which explains how and why the widow and her children moved from PA to MN in 1883.  When George Sr.’s first wife died, he later married the widow McInerny in Watkins, Meeker County, Minnesota. There are both church and civil records about this, as well as the records of the marriages of the surviving daughters.  The civil marriage register record is online.

With the help of researchers in Ireland and England we also have a lot of detail about the families of Michael McInerny and Maryann Coyne, including the names of their parents, siblings and more.  We know where Michael and Maryann were born and where they lived and when.  We know when they emigrated: Michael in 1865 and Maryann in January, 1866 and that she was pregnant during the voyage and had a baby son, born upon arrival, named Michael, who only lived a few days and was interred in New York City, probably at whatever cemetery was nearest Castle Garden, the emigrant center where she had to wait for her husband to arrive and take her and her children to Pennsylvania where he’d already secured work.  The next child was born in October, 1866 in Locust Gap, as per the baptismal record, etc.. 

Some of these records, such as the 1870 and 1880 census record, the emigration record, etc. are online at Ancestry, which has cross links with Find a Grave.  Many civil marriage register records, and public death records are online now and free. Maryann Coyne-Langford-McInerny-Neubauer-Kennedy had a public death record for her death in Minneapolis in 1921.  She was living with a daughter and the daughter’s family there in 1920 and on the census.  Her oldest surviving daughter, Mary Catherine, married Johann Heinrich Beckers in St. Anthony’s Church Watkins, and died in Minnesota in 1969.  Again, there are public records for these events.

Also the original family name, even on earlier records, was McInerny.  Maryann was almost entirely illiterate and when she, as a widow with mostly young children, moved to Minnesota. She and her children dropped a syllable from their surname and it became McNerny (under various spellings). For her only surviving son, however, who was literate, changing the family surname was a symbol of a new, fresh start, to put the pain and suffering of his family in Locust Gap, and the life in its coal mines, firmly behind.  Still, what the younger children did not know, or forgot was that Maryann also had a sister, Harriet Coyne, who married John Joyce.  Harriet also came to Northumberland County, and lived in and around Shamokin. Her descendants live there to this present day.  Again, this could have been found, had the “memorial manager,” just done a little looking.

The current manager of the memorial, however, not looking at the 1880 census record, didn’t realize only one brother of Mary Catherine had survived and that the brother didn’t stay in the same state as his mother and sisters and didn’t know about Maryann’s two later marriages, or Mary Catherine’s sister’s marriages, though they are in public records. He didn’t know about Maryann’s sister, though a member of her sister’s family was even a witness to the baptism of one of Maryann’s younger children.   All of this would have resulted in fewer graves in Minnesota with either the McInerny or McNerny surname mentioned. He just grabbed one obituary with the surname, didn’t even check the 1880 census as well as not reading the obituary and then attached the mother and grandmother of 275 adult persons to some other family–and did it publicly.

For someone to just grab her daughter Mary Catherine’s memorial and picture of that headstone and attach it to a clearly unrelated family–easily established to be unrelated is far too typical of the sloppy family history research and even basic reading of documents, such as an obituary that did NOT even mention her, and sloppy posting of memorials within family groupings on Find a Grave.  Yet this incident with public claims of her being out of an unrelated family are in a public venue and being spread and copied by far too many people willing to believe anything they see on these sites and just grab what they see without examination and attach it to trees and histories.  The same thing is happening to other persons and their families, again and again.

It’s the kind of behavior that has led many history professors at college to say “family history is as related to real history as astrology is to astronomy” and to sometimes advise students of “real history” who intend to make a career somehow connected to real history to not mention to graduate schools, and prospective employers in their field that they do family history, even as a hobby. 

This kind of sloppy, careless public presentation has confused and annoyed family members of the real families.  It needs to stop.  READ people, look at multiple records and consistencies within them, and be careful what you put out in public. If you manage Find a Grave memorials that are not of your own family, especially treat them with respect and care .

As a result of this and other similar situations, my husband and I do NOT put our trees on Ancestry, nor the graves and death data we know about and about which we have some documentation on these public sites which have so much error filled garbage groupings and trees on them.  Neither do a lot of other more careful researchers and writers.  It’s seen as like “rolling one’s self and one’s work in a gutter.”   Yes, you may find gold and diamonds in those gutters in searching for ancestors and where they last lived and were interred,, but you go through a lot of muck to find them–and then you have to clean up and test those “gems and gold” to make sure they are real.

At a recent large Scottish festival, we also pointed out the history of errors, mistrust, etc. recently to representatives of “Family Search” which has a site that indicates online sources of information for counties and states.  However, they mostly cite repositories of public records both online and only available in those states in microfilm or book form, and some materials from some counties’ historical and genealogical societies (not all, nor the condition they are in), and then materials available on their affiliates’ sites, such as “Ancestry” and “Find a Grave.”  We suggested that Family Search work a little harder to find and cooperate with the many other entities and their sites that have solid materials about individual and/or multiple families, counties, states, etc..  Because of that history of errors and mistrust, there are many more sites than just those with whom Family Search has already had projects and joint ventures.  They are just as helpful, sometimes more so, than all that Family Search identifies and describes in its current sites and some of these other sites should be added to Family Search’s counties’ and states’ sites as additional resources that researchers might examine.