The headstone showed her birth and death dates. I found that a photo of her headstone had been added and a photo of the cemetery. It was a very emotional moment for me to when I awakened the next morning to an email saying to check Trixy’s listing for an update. I put in a request for a volunteer to take a photo of Trixy’s headstone for me. People who use Find a Grave for research sign up as volunteers for the area in which they live and when a request is made they get an email asking if they can fulfill that request. Anyone accessing the site can put in a request for a volunteer to go to a cemetery, take a photo of a headstone for a particular listing and add it to the listing. Some volunteers take a photo of each headstone and the entrance to the cemetery and add those photos and any information that can be found on the headstone. Hundreds of volunteers worldwide access cemetery records where they live and add information to the Find a Grave site.
This brings me to how Find a Grave is administered. It appeared that the person adding this info had added it based on cemetery records and not headstone photos. There was a year of death but no birth date listed.
The listing had her full name which I had never known, Della Beatrix West. A memorial had been added for her nine months earlier that had not been there when I conducted my initial search. When I added Trixy’s photo a hint came up for Find a Grave. One day, about a year after first searching for Trixie (how I thought her name was spelled at the time) on Find a Grave, I was scanning and entering a photo for each of my mother’s siblings on my A ncestry family tree. I am fortunate to have photos of each of mother’s siblings when they were young. I looked for a listing on Find a Grave hoping to be able to fill in some details about dates of birth and death and her full name. So I thought she must have died shortly after this census. My mother thought she had died at about two years of age. Based on that I guessed her birth year to be 1907. The 1910 census in New Mexico lists Trixy’s name as Della B and shows her age as three years old. My mother’s family moved to Roswell, New Mexico in the early 1900s and then back to Oklahoma before my mother was born in 1920. I knew that she died very young and that my other aunts and uncles had memories of her. As a child I was always aware of this aunt whom I had never met. She was born and died in New Mexico many years before my mother was born. While I have found many facts and dates on Find a Grave, the most emotional find for me was a listing for my Aunt Trixy. It has grown from a site to find out where famous people are buried to an invaluable tool for family history research. Every day, contributors from around the world enter new records. The site is largely filled with information and photos from volunteers. Jim soon found a whole community of people who shared his passion. The Find a Grave website was created by Jim Tipton in 1995 because he could not find an existing site focused on his hobby of visiting the graves of famous people. Find a Grave has provided me with information, photos and leads for every branch of my family tree.