Day: August 10, 2022

Ancestry pictures

Meaghan4 Comments

Last night I went on Ancestry.com and was running name after name through the system — older cases of people who disappeared in their teenage years. Found a bunch of high school yearbook photos I didn’t previously have. And I’m not done yet. Here’s the list thus far of cases with photos added:

  1. Marie Ann Blee
  2. Kellie Marie Brownlee
  3. Josephine Yvette Cogburn
  4. Joyce Irene Cogburn
  5. Phyllis Marie Corbin
  6. Perry Otto Corlew
  7. William Henry Forshee Jr.
  8. Dermot Faulkner Kelly
  9. Jeannette Rose Miller
  10. Sophia Felecita Moreno
  11. Cathy Marie Moulton
  12. Sherry Jean Pickle
  13. Marcia Estelle Remick
  14. Diane Marie Webb
  15. Mitchel Fred Weiser

I have to give credit where it’s due: I got the idea of fishing for photos on Ancestry from Carl Koppelman. He would often dig up a yearbook photo when there was a NamUs case of a missing adult that had no photo available. Even a pic of the person in their high school or college days, years before they went missing, is better than none at all.

I also happened to find some pictures of my great-grandparents and added them to Reddit.

Yesterday I got my first subreddit ban, for “using dehumanizing language.” The “dehumanizing language” was me referring to the 1920s-1930s era actor and comedian Roscoe Arbuckle by his stage name. It was supposed to be a seven-day ban but only lasted like five minutes because I messaged the moderators and pointed out the context and defended myself: I had said the word “Fatty” as an identifier and not a slur, and I didn’t think it was fair that I should get banned for this seeing as how Roscoe called himself that. The moderators saw it my way, rescinded the ban and apologized for the misunderstanding.

Now, if only Facebook mods were like that. But they can’t be, because they’re robots and not human beings. It was a Reddit modbot that automatically banned me for using Roscoe Arbuckle’s stage name, but there were humans operating that bot, humans who could be reasoned with. Facebook will remain broken for as long as robot moderators outnumber human moderators like a thousand to one. I posted on my Facebook about my Reddit ban and was afraid to even type Roscoe Arbuckle’s stage name, I was like “Look it up if you don’t know it, I don’t want to get Zucked for the zillionth time.”