Find a Grave

Usually they're women.

And I'm figuring out what their names are by looking in newspaper records, using findagrave.com or sometimes physically going out into the cemetery and looking at the headstone to try and figure out who this person who is listed as Mrs. John Smith actually is.

Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

That's if you can even still read the thing, too, unfortunately.

In August of 2025, Ancestry changed its terms of service to prohibit the use of its site in connection with any law enforcement investigation or judicial proceeding.

Because Ancestry also owned sites like newspapers.com and Find a Grave, that single change cut off practitioners from a huge share of the records that they had depended upon for years.

To talk through what that meant, I sat down in January with Karen Binder, now director of the IgG Center at Ramapo College and one of the field's earliest practitioners.

Since then, I've kept up with how IgG experts were approaching casework under the new restrictions and what innovations might come out of it.

She was direct about the limit.

The field is still relying on the websites hosting those records, and losing ancestry has not stopped stinging.

Ancestry and the sites it owns, like Fold3, Newspapers.com, and Find a Grave, they are off the table for this work now.

So people have shifted towards smaller resources, state archives, local libraries, and free databases with public records.

Not long after Polly disappeared, he was moved to a nursing home in Jacksonville, where he remained for quite some time.

I found an obituary in the Florida Times-Union from October 1982 and a Find a Grave profile, which state that a man with his exact name died in early October 1982.

But I couldn't confirm if that is the same Robert.

All the information and details line up, so if it is him, then he didn't live very long after Polly disappeared.

And he was never sort of officially implicated in her murder.

According to findagrave.com, which admittedly isn't the most reliable source, Bobby had six siblings.

And after her father and brother were swept away in a flood, their mother couldn't afford to take care of all six children.

So she made the very tough decision to give them up.

When I first looked for the final resting place of Major League Baseball player, college football All-American, Penn Relay decathlon champion Joseph Howard Berry Jr., a member of the University of Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, I felt as if I'd stepped into an escape room.

The Laurel Hill app and Find a Grave both place him in niche 67 of the tower room.

That's an aptly described place.

It's at the base of the bell tower in the columbarium at the top of the hill at Laurel Hill West in Bella Kinwood.

There's a comfortable chair with a side table, a west-facing window, gentle lighting.

There's a door that leads to the tower stairs.

But Find a Grave's photo of niche 67 shows not a conventional marker of any kind or a glass window that displays urns inside.

It's a flat brass plaque at floor level.

It is now straight genealogy.

All you're doing is building these individuals in the databases, their family tree DNA using public source information, census records, obituaries, findagrave.com.

Marriage certificates.

Exactly.

Yeah,

findagrave.com.

I do it all the time.

You do? For fun? If I'm looking for something, that's where I found Kitty Middleton's grave the other day when I showed it to you.

When I first looked for the final resting place of Major League Baseball player, college football All-American, Penn Relay decathlon champion Joseph Howard Berry Jr., a member of the University of Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, I felt as if I'd stepped into an escape room.

The Laurel Hill app and Find a Grave both place him in niche 67 of the tower room.

That's an aptly described place.

It's at the base of the bell tower in the columbarium at the top of the hill at Laurel Hill West in Bella Kinwood.

There's a comfortable chair with a side table, a west-facing window, gentle lighting.

There's a door that leads to the tower stairs.

But Find a Grave's photo of niche 67 shows not a conventional marker of any kind or a glass window that displays urns inside.

It's a flat brass plaque at floor level.