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FindAGrave_Downloader is a Windows program which allows automated, recursive download of memorial data from the FindAGrave website.
Find A Grave started in the mid-1990s as a database of photographs and information on the burial sites of famous people and celebrities. It later expanded to start including information on the graves of non-celebrities. In 2013, the site was acquired by Ancestry.com, and since then, the number of memorial records has greatly expanded, and a flood of genealogical data linked to those records has been posted. It's a rich resource for genealogical researchers, but it can be difficult for a researcher to navigate page-by-page through all the data to incorporate it into their own databases.
FindAGrave_Downloader attempts to make this process easier by performing automated, recursive downloads of information from the online database. Starting from a given individual, one may download all of their ancestors or all of their descendants, or more complex datasets. The datasets are saved as standard GEDCOM files which can be imported into any of the major genealogical database programs (Legacy Family Tree, Ancestral Quest, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker). All of these programs allow careful comparison of imported data with existing data, so that you can be sure you're not just dumping a lot of data of uncertain provenance into your database.
FindAGrave_Downloader optionally generates an HTML file (example shown) which summarizes the downloaded individuals, giving their basic biographical data, a link to their FindAGrave webpage, and a link to the main picture on that webpage. This file is useful in getting an overview of the contents of the associated GEDCOM file.
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The download file is an installation program. Download it to your hard disk and double click it to unpack the program and its help file to the current directory.
Before running FindAGrave_Downloader for the first time, it is a good idea to read the Help file for advice on how to set the run parameters of the program