Do you remember visiting a cemetery and being careful not to step on a grave?
When I first found out that the cemetery that some of my ancestors are buried in - privacy seeking individuals one and all - had been tramped over and the personal information on tombstones put up on the Internet, I was seething. We had just recently buried a family member in this cemetery, a person who loved their privacy in life, and there was their name and location of burial for the world to see, to me too an invasion of privacy. And then I called the same cemetery where we had paid for perpetual care and asked for the burial records for other ancestors buried there and was given attitude and a demand for research fees. Now I was seething plus! How could they have lead us to believe this was a private, religious, place and then allowed these people to post all that information about burials on the net? OR HAD THEY EVEN BEEN APPROACHED FOR PERMISSION?
Of course the posters had been trampling through a lot of cemeteries and thought what they were posting was of great help to the family history and genealogy researchers. They posted that if you discovered your family member on this list and did not want them on it, to contact them and they would remove the name right away. Why not ask us first, I thought! And besides, information once put on the net has a way of being there for years - cached!
At the same time I've benefited from a couple different tombstone sites. In particular I've benefited from tombstone sites that reveal burials of the 19th century, the Civil War.
I am still torn about this subject.
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