BillionGraves

BillionGraves consists of a website and smart phone app by AppTime, LLC.

Their goal is to get a billion graves (or more) put online.

BillionGraves has 2 keys to success.


 * Smart Phones
 * Crowd-sourcing transcriptions

- Gathering Headstone Images via Smartphone
What does a smart phone have to do with getting a billion graves?


 * 1) Increased speed of photography - Many smart phones photograph images quickly and save images even faster than either a simple digital camera or a DSLR.
 * 2) The phone's GPS organizes everything - It will put the photos in the correct cemetery and will GPS tag every photo's location exaclty. This feature is exciting for many reasons, such as keeping track of which headstones have been photographed already and helping descendents find the headstone should they want to visit in person. On Find A Grave you have to select which cemetery to upload your photos to after you took your camera home and transferred the photos to your computer.
 * 3) Instant uploading - If you have a good data plan, upload images while you are taking more pictures. The phone does it for you, just set it up under the settings tab of the app. If your data plan is an issue you can simply wait until you get to WiFi, start the process, and the phone does the rest. You can even save more time by having your phone auto-delete images that have been uploaded. Even if you do not have a data plan on your smartphone or tablet, you can still upload via Wifi.

BillionGraves and Crowdsourcing
How will crowd-sourcing help?

Crowd-sourcing means that anyone can help with transcription. All you have to do is go to BillionGraves.com and click "Transcribe." The online transcribing form is easy to use. With Find A Grave you could transcribe them yourself or... that is basically the only option. If you are good at taking lots of pictures, but only transcribe a little at a time then this feature is for you. You can even choose to only transcribe or to only photograph graves. It is kind of like a FamilySearch Indexing for cemeteries and graves.

BillionGraves, a FamilySearch Affiliate
BillionGraves is an affiliate of FamilySearch and has been featured on the FamilySearch blog:


 * BillionGraves
 * Preserving the Memories of A Billion Graves
 * Learn More about BillionGraves.com

According to one post, Preserving the Memories of A Billion Graves: "All extracted information will be searchable through the BillionGraves’ website database, and will soon be accessible at FamilySearch.org."

For More Information
To learn more about searching the BillionGraves database on FamilySearch.org go to Billiongraves Index (FamilySearch Historical Records).

The Goal of BillionGraves
From the BillionGraves.com website:

BillionGraves' Goal

We hope to provide an expansive family history database for records and images from the world’s cemeteries—but it’s not something we can do alone. We need you to help us by collecting images from your local cemeteries and transcribing the information those headstone images provide.

Help us make family history research more accessible to everyone. Take the BillionGraves.com iPhone/Android app with you when you go to the cemetery and contribute to the grave image database. Even if you don’t have the gadgets required to collect images for BillionGraves, you can still help build the database by transcribing the images so anyone, anywhere, can find ancestors’ graves with just a few clicks of the mouse.