New Find-a-Grave site is fashionably illegible

The last couple of times I have gone to the Find-a-Grave site I have been taken to the "new" site, and have quickly switched back to the old one, because the new one is much more difficult to use. I am sorry to see that the old one is to be retired soon, because, whatever its other faults, it is at least legible on screen.

It seems to be fashionable among web designers nowadays to make their pages as difficult to read as possible, and the new Find-a-Grave site is no exception to this, and is a particularly egregious example.

After battling to make out what was written on the new site, the moment I switched to the old one everything became clear. This is in spite of the fact that the old site uses a smaller font size than the new one. The difference in legibility is due to the better contrast between text and background on the old site, and also the greater thickness of the letters.

So if one is measuring the site by "user experience", I would rate the old site at 55% and the new one at 5%. The main user experience is frustration at trying to puzzle out what is written on the screen.

The new site may bring oohs and aahs from other 20-something web designers, because it follows all the fashionable trends. But spare a thought for the poor suckers who actually want to use the site. Many of us are over 60, and our eyesight is not what it was when we were 20.

PS My wife looked at the new site on her computer and found it easier to read than I did on my computer. Perhaps if you have one of those old-fashioned monitors with little knurled knobs that you can use for adjusting brightness and contrast you could fiddle with them until some of the presently illegible text might become readable, but my flat-screen Samsung monitor has automatic adjustment of brightness and contrast, so I'm stuck with it. And the fact remains that the old site is perfectly legible to me, and large parts of the new one are not legible, using exactly the same computer and monitor. So I can say unequivocally that the new site is designed to give a very bad user experience. I can't even make out the words on the screen wearing two pairs of glasses and holding a magnifying glass up to the screen.

Growing cities face a grave problem

There's been quite a bit of discussion in the South African Genealogy Mailing List recently about the problems of growing cities and lack of cemetery space. The latest round was sparked off by the news that Buffalo City (East London) Municipality is considering re-using graves because of shortage of cemetery space. And as people have contributed to the discussion, there are various stories about other cities thinking of doing the same.

But there's nothing new in this. In the very same week, this news story surfaced in San Francisco - Tombstones from long ago surfacing on S.F. beach:

Strong winds and shifting sands have uncovered an eerie reminder of San Francisco's past: discarded gravestones and broken tomb markers used decades ago to shore up the Ocean Beach seawall.The tombstones became visible this week, including bits and pieces of marble and granite that once marked the final resting places of citizens long dead.One of them is the nearly intact marble tombstone of Delia Presby Oliver, who died at the age of 26 on Apr. 9, 1890.

Her remains were removed and reburied when San Francisco authorities closed nearly all the city cemeteries and moved the bodies to Colma in the early 20th century - part of a move to make space for the growing city. Oliver's original tombstone and thousands like it were used as landfill or in other ways throughout San Francisco.

Some were used as breakwaters. Pieces of others were used to line the gutters of Haight-Ashbury's Buena Vista Park. Some gravestones were used to build the seawall along the Great Highway. Large tombs and crypts were dumped into San Francisco Bay.

I wonder if the inscriptions on these tombstones were recorded before they were dumped?

In the UK burials often took place in churchyards, but as villages were swallowed up in urban sprawl, cemeteries were established, and many of the churchyards have been cleared of graves. One solution has been to put all the old gravestones around the walls of the churchyard. I must admit I hadn't thought of them being dumped into the sea.

I also wonder about the culture clash in South Africa. There have been some claims to land restitution on the grounds that people's ancestors are buried in such and such a place. And in the past there was a lot of resistance to people being forcibly moved in the ethnic cleansing that took place under apartheid, on the grounds that they did not want to be moved from the places where their ancestors were buried. I wonder how well the Buffalo City Municipality's plans will sit with people who see things in that light?

Cemetery vandalism in Queenstown, Eastern Cape

On our recent holiday we visited Queenstown cemetery in the Eastern Cape to take photos of my great grandparents graves. It was hard to find them, and as we walked up and down looking, we passed a number of graves that had been vandalised, with headstones knocked over, and crosses broken.

Eventually we found the graves we were looking for, but though the stones were intact, the metal railings around the grave had been removed, presumbably by metal thieves. We took quite a lot of photos of them, just in case the next time we, or other members of the family try to find them, they too are lying on the ground with the inscription side down, and possibly broken into pieces.