Have Phone Will Capture

If you have a smart phone with GPS enabled, you too can become part of a fun new project to build a database of over 1 billion gravestone records! An adventuresome group out in Utah have decided to make it really easy for folks to add records to a rapidly expanding database of headstone pictures with a new application called Billion Graves (http://BillionGraves.com). Unlike many of the other sites that track burials, the only wasy to add records to Billion Graves is by taking a picture with your GPS-enabled phone and uploading it to the site. You don't even have to take the time to document the stones after you snap the pictures - Billion Graves lets the site visitors do the transcriptions (though you can still do them yourself if you want).

So what makes this any different than a site like Find-A-Grave? Besides the obvious difference of only showing entries that have photos, Billion Graves uses the GPS coordinates from within the photograph to actually plot the stones on a map of the cemetery. That GPS feature comes in really handy as it also lets you see at a glance any cemeteries that are nearby as you travel, along with a count of how many images have been added to a particular cemetery. And when you actually stop at a cemetery, the application detects which cemetery you are visting and logs that to your account. If you then want to take a few pcitures while you're there, they are automatically attached to the right cemetery using the GPS coordinates. The web version of the application alows you to search across the entire dataset for a person or to search for a cemetery to view all the entries. An add-on to the phone app (for $2.99) allows you, among other things, to view all the records in a cemetery when you're in the cemetery, making it very easy to tell if a pciture has already been entered for a particular stone.

The process is so easy, it really is a snap to add a lot of records in a hurry, and I'm pleased to note that my iPhone takes nice pictures! I installed the application on my phone yesterday and this afternoon made a quick trip out to a nearby cemetery to test it out. For my test, I chose St. Luke's Winter's and snapped about 3 dozen photos. While I could have uploaded them right then and there, I chose to go back home and tether my phone to our home internet first before doing the upload. It went through very quickly and as soon as the upload finished (less than 5 minutes), I was able to go to the site and transcribe my photos. It really works nicely and it's easy to see how a group of folks could photograph an entire cemetery qutie rapidly - it only took me about 10 minutes to take my pictures. Think how quickly a team could work!

Carroll County has a real advantage over some areas when doing this kind of work as the multi-volume set of Cemetery reoord books done by the Genealogical Society would be a tremendous help in decipehering some of the hard-to-read stones. This might well be the perfect timeof the year to do this sort of project while the temperatures are cooler and the lighting not as harsh as earlier in the year. I'd really like to see if others are interested in working together on some of the local cemeteries, so I urge all of you to take a look at the Billion Graves site and see what you think!