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The journey defined my grandfather started back in two thousand and seventeen or thereabout ts um when I decided to find his identity for the first time.

Tony tran, slate senior tech editor b, didn't have much information to go by. His grandparents met in vietnam during the war.

and growing up, I never knew who he was, and my mom never knew who he was because her m, my grandma and her had lost contact with him shortly out of the war. And my grandma was very, very, kind of a hush about who he was like.

very kg. Tony grandmother, the not long after the war, was always pretty quiet about the specifics of the man who fell in love with.

We knew some things. We know those in american soldier who served in vietnam during the mutilate sixties and left in the early seventies. And I always want to to find his identity. And IT wasn't until I embarked on this geneology project, was unable to find him.

Part of the way tony did that was by using the website find a grave dot com. The site is the best position of information, pictures of headstones, family photos, little memorials to the dead bright.

the process of looking for his identity and trying to find out who he was, I would find different, like find a grave, memorials and pages. And IT always came across my mind, like, what if I found him on one of these websites one day? And I really going to push that back away, because in my mind, I really just wanted to find him alive. So when I did come to the point where I discovered he's find a grave page and his own bitchy found out, yes, indeed, he had died back in two thousand and thirteen. I was I, I will be honest, I was like, I was heart broken.

Tony couldn't meet him, couldn't introduce his mom to her own father, but he could do something else.

IT wasn't until a few years later was I able to make a trip down to where he was buried in houston, texas, a small town outside of houston called like IT. I remember pulling up to this churchyard and finding his grave like pretty much immediately, and just being completely overwhelmed with emotions. And so IT IT was a really cool experience, because not only was I was able to find his grave and take a picture of IT, but I was also able to find the graves of other ancestors that I had discovered and relatives that I had found throughout the process of researching and searching for him.

Tony put the pictures on find a grave dot com, something he now also does for strangers, helping create a digital tribute to their loved ones, a place where they can gather or remember online.

They felt IT to finally be able to not only lay eyes on this gray, but take a picture of IT and memorialize online for as long as that will last.

Today, on the show inside the creative, Carrying and controversial world, find a grave. 点 com， i'm was your lary and you're listening to what next? Tb, D, A show about technology, power and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

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When find grave began back in one thousand nine hundred ninety five, IT was the hobby est website founder jim tipped in like to visit celebrity graves and discovered that other people shared his interest and wanted to have a .

community online and now it's kind of like this big volunteer based effort to digitize, memorialized just different grapes and you know a lot of IT is based on the geological and necessary community and people who are interest in researching their families history, their relatives where they came from.

Um but it's also being used by like you know, people like historians and journalists and people who are inter cited in in covering some piece of history. For me, it's also in for a lot of other people who referred to themselves as gravers. It's also like this hobby that we undertake as well. Thereby we you know either digitize a bitch aries or people who have passed on recently or we go out and we take pictures of different grave sites throughout the world just so there's A A record of IT A A memorial to the people who have passed on.

How big is IT like? How many graves are there? If you you know, if you're just to run a person, you think, like, let me see who I can find. Here is our good chance you can find what you're looking for.

So there are thousands of grapes being uploaded on to find a grave each and every day. Um I don't have the hard numbers in front of me, but I think the memorials that they have well into the millions by this point it's really the biggest and also the most comprehensive uh uh digital memorial service of its kind and I say that with the coffee at that find a grave is pretty western centric. So I I mean, you're probably going to find more people within the problems of like amErica and also like places like england or france or germany in there rather than say, hey, somebody who lived and died a in a small farm outside of psychic tnm but yeah I there is a pretty good chance that if you have a loved one who has passed on, who has been buried, they probably have an entry and find a grave outcome.

And I understand it's it's no owned by ancestry dot com. Clearly, they see some value in this part of kind of tapping into this big online geneology ical community.

Well, yes, and that's a relationship that kind seems obvious on the surface that they would have a hand and find a grave outcome uh because most of the people who do use IT and a lot of gravers are people who are just ancestry enthusiast people like me who had questions about their past and their family and one of to dig into IT a little bit more, they believe they bought find a grave that comm back in two thousand and thirteen. And you know, that raises a lot of different questions as well in regards to, you know, what does that mean to have a service like this be owned and essentially Operated by this huge private company, this corporation that to be fair, just cares about the bottom line but for the most part though, find a grave that come has been pretty good about being um its own separate entity. Like it's still very much volunteer based.

Talk to me about the graver community that you're a part of um how does that work?

The grave our community is very it's very interesting like any internet subculture is um the the drivers themselves are all primarily based on these different web forums, including five grams own web forms, but also in various like facebook communities and also a uh on different the chinoy reforms as well.

Um uh but they they are just people who mostly like to spend a lot of their time online talking and swapping tips about how to find certain cemeteries or one of the best practices or how to treat graves and what not. I found that like there is has been a tone of overlap between the ancestry community and grave s themselves and if you know anything about the accessory community, you can you know that they can be also a little bit like weird, prickly sometimes. Like people come into IT with a lot of very, very strong opinion, how to go about different research tactics and what not.

But ultimately, they are also just incredibly helpful as well. Because, you know, like an after, like this at its core is is is just quite out altruistic as as much as IT is like a way to pass the time in a hot of hours. Crayons, like me and other people who i've met, a lot of the people have spoken to for the story. They are doing this because they truly do care about memorializing and remembering the people who have passed on, whether IT believe, you know, for future historical purposes, or whether IT be because we just simply believe that people need to be remembered.

Tony describes himself as a mercenary grave finder, a photographic hired gun. He takes requests from strangers online to track down and document different grapes. But the motivates for other grave finders vary.

Yes, there are people who like to say, just create memorials to different people who have passed on on, find a grave. So some people will literally read, like pick up a newspaper and just read through the orbiter's and create a memorial for all those people who have passed on just to make sure that there is a record of and great.

Um there's also a lot of P I know who do this process called mowing the lawn where that's a final grave term uh within the community for folks who just go through a cemetery and take a picture of literally every single grave site they can see. And I know some folks we've had like tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of like photos taken and memorials uploaded just using this method alone. Those people tend to care much more about their the cemetery specifically rather than any specific grave. But yeah, it's different ways and different approaches for how you can be a graver but ultimately the goals the same like we're just trying to memorialize those who have passed on.

When we come back, what happens if you don't want your loved ones grave on the internet?

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Hey everyone, it's mary Harris, host of slaves daily news podcast to White next it's been a long road to election day. How you doing? We've had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a .

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You know, before I got ready to talk to you, I went on find a grave and I looked for my great grandfather, assuming he would be on there because he was a federal judge, I thought like, okay yeah he was you know kind of a public person. People would have um maybe taking pictures of his grave what I was not expecting was not just his page, but like all these other relatives of mine and then photos of my mother as a little girl were on here. How does find a grave reckon with putting all this information that is sensitive, private and a lot of ways very surprising for relatives just online?

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something that I know that find a grave, the team and find a grave and people at ancestry to come are continuing to grapple with because IT is dying. When you just had a loved one passed away, you go out, you find out that there information and neuter information, but also their photos are are available online.

IT IT can be drawn wing and IT can be quite traumatic, especially if you're still in the grieving process. Find a grave and necessary to com, I know, has come up with a few different rules and standards and order to try and fix this or at least make IT Better for for those who are grieving, like people who have just passed. Uh, I know that there is a certain time limit before a memorial can be made for them. And I know that there is kind of this unspoken rule within to find a great community that if, say, you stumble upon the page of a love one free like assembled upon the web page for my grandfather, um you are able to go on and message the person who created that page, who owns that memorial page you can explain your circumstance you can say like, hey, this is somebody who was close to me who passed away um uh, could I have this page and more like more often than not, i've never heard of an instance when people didn't just hand the page over. I'll just give you control and rights of that page so in that small way, you know the community also recognizes sometimes that these issues can be very sensitive and they they try they try to meet the person who is graving where they are.

You know there's A A sort of interesting tension here that I think comes up with a lot of online geneology projects like ancestry 点 com or twenty three and me， which we recently didn't episode on, where you have some members of a family who are all in on going through this process, putting things on the internet and maybe others who don't want any of their information up there. But it's out there anyway because you know what cousin or an ant or whoever is, is really interested in this.

That's just sort of the thing that a lot of people, including myself, like even now has to contend with when IT comes to embarking on these genoese projects. You know, like one of the main things that i've read and that i've heard from other people when I came to advice, when I start started out with my geneology project to find my grandfather, it's that you might not like what you find and it's something that you have to come to terms with.

Like when you take A D N A test, or when you start digg into these weird, more mysterious parts of your families history, you might end of finding something that is just ground breaking, just earth shattering for you and your family people. You know, there have been stories about people finding out that their father is and their actual father, or they were actually adopted, or or things like that. Or in my case, I I found out that my grandfather was dead. Not only that, but I found out that my grandfather was actually married when he had my mother back in one nine hundred and sixty six with my grandmother. Um yeah all these different questions that we have you know we we think we might know the answer, but sometimes IT turns out the answer can be very uncomfortable, can be very IT, can be very painful even but that's the risk world willing to take sometimes um especially when IT comes to answering some of the biggest questions that we ve had all of our lives for me that was who my grandfather .

was all of this data that were talking about, you know, the names, the birth dates, in some cases, photos, family trees. Where does IT all .

go right now? It's a whole and find a grave currently IT IT actually a good kind of repository for to collect h all of this information in a good way and make them available to the public. But you know, I think the other thing that's important to note is that when IT comes of things like death records and birth certificates and census data, all the information is already available.

Like people can go out and find that already the thing that find a grave does is just puts IT all online uh in in one central location and so people can be uncomfortable with. I think it's completely fair to have all this data about a person um in one place, this on one where page that anyone can visit. But the factor of the matter is that information is already out there and people want to find IT and they have good reasons to find that. I think like my own generation project.

after reading the story, how do you how do you feel about this process? Has IT changed your feelings at all about being a graver, or about find grid?

Writing the story really give me a good opportunity to reflect on why I do find a grave and why I continue to do IT, even though I have found the added my grandfather and for me it's a few things um and I think like number one, IT is just kind of a lovely way to spend the saturday morning or afternoon uh people don't typically associate things like cemeteries and graveyards with a peaceful, relaxing, fun time on saturday.

But I think I would back to the honestly, would most cemeteries are completely lovely places. I know here in chicago, we have a handful of really, really great cemetaries. Graceland, a cemetary in chicago also acts in arber edom. These are lovely places. People come here to walk their dogs, they come here to go on walks and exercise, even people take their lunch breaks there. Um cemeteries to me, act as this also, uh ironically enough, a kind of living museum, one that is constantly crowing and occasionally shrinking and is constantly a reflection of the community and city that is in the other thing is I just do genuinely believe that there is such in importance in remembrance and people who have passed away no matter how big or small their lives actually were um I think about people like my grandfather who whose grave was Frankly quite unloved um sitting in the middle of leg taxes in an empty you know in a churchyard somewhere um how sad that makes me to think about the fact that his grave was in love and no one was there to remember him until I took a picture of IT until I posted IT online until I was the one who decided made the effort to remember um I think there is a power to that and Frankly I I think part of IT too is I would hope that someone would do the same for me one day.

Tony turn, thank you for reading this story and for coming on to talk about IT.

Of course, thank you so much for .

having tony. Tran is a senior editor at sleep, and that is IT for our show today. What next? T, B, D is produced by evan Campbell, Patrick ford, and share of our show was edited by page osborne, alex amon, gamard's vice president, audio for slate.

And T, V D is part of the larger what next family. And if you like, what you listen to today, the single best way to support our work is to join slight plus. You get all your podcasts, including this one, add free, just head on over to sleep dot com flash what next plus to sign up alright, will be back next week with more episodes. I'm lazarre. Thanks for listing.