Tuesday, August 13, 2013

BillionGraves.com

BillionGraves is a website with an interesting premise. The site encourages users to download an app to their smartphone or tablet and take pictures of gravestones at cemeteries they visit. The app uses the phone's GPS to identify the cemetery and will tag every photo's location exactly. The app uploads the photos automatically to the website and maps the locations of the photos. Volunteers online look at the photos that have been uploaded and transcribe the information off of the headstones into a searchable database.

BillionGraves hopes to eventually have photos of one billion graves
(or more!) searchable on their website. The site has been around for a couple of years but it's growing in popularity and already has an extensive collection of graves in the US.

The database itself is easy to use and GPS tagging also makes it simple to visit a cemetery and find the location of a specific grave site too. While the database is not quite as extensive as FindAGrave, the site is growing all the time. That's the charm of BillionGraves. It's incredibly easy for users to help grow the collection by choosing to either go out and photograph grave sites or by just sitting at the computer, transcribing what others have already uploaded.

If you want to help with photographing graves, the app can be downloaded for free through Android Market/Google Play or the iPhone App Store.

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