Truth Rises

Several years ago I came across a quote about Easter that I really like. It says:

"Easter says you can put Truth in a grave but it won't stay there. You can nail it to a cross, wrap it in winding sheets and shut it up in a tomb, but it will rise!"

My mother said the same thing once in words something like this: "You don't have to make a big fuss to defend yourself; wait it out and the truth will rise." I saw it happen this morning and the taste of victory is sweet.

I've been a member of FindAGrave for six years. On this website, people can enter burials and post pictures of gravestones. It's a great asset to those of us afflicted with genealogy disease. On this website I can find people in other states without going there. A gravestone is considered a primary source and seeing a photo of an out-of-state stone confirms information without requiring me to travel anywhere.

 However, the website is only as good as the people who post the information on it. Some people are more interested in quantity than quality. They will enter burials from a cemetery record in a library (secondary source) without checking for accuracy. Even worse, some will list burials from sources such as Ancestry.com family trees which are not regulated or to be trusted. And at the bottom of the ladder are people who simply guess and create memorials without anything to support them.

I ran into one such person this summer. He found a memorial page I had created several years ago with a photo of the stone as proof and wanted to claim it as his ancestor. When I detected that his information was not accurate and refused to let him have it, he got downright nasty. Most people I have met on FindAGrave are sensible and easy to work with, but not this one.

When I wouldn't surrender my lady to him, he went ahead and made memorials of his own for the lady and her husband with the information he wanted to believe. He changed her name to make it fit what he wanted it to be. I pointed out that these people could not be as his ancestors as they lived in another county and the county records showed the husband died a year before the one (with the same name) he was claiming. In addition, the lady was still living when her "husband" married his second wife. He claimed he had family records and can prove I'm wrong. I was not going to fight but neither was I going to accept his story when the facts showed otherwise. Anyone who could do the math would see his story didn't hold water. I just bided my time and waited for the truth to rise.

This morning I checked again to see the status of his fictitious person. It's gone! Either he finally did the math or enough people told him he's wrong. I suspect it was the later because he removed his email address from his profile. Whatever happened, the truth has risen!