The website billiongraves.com is attempting to photograph and index a billion sites from the world’s cemeteries to provide an expansive family history database, all tagged with GPS locations.
The video below explains how they are asking for your help to collect and transcribe headstone images.
A group of 120 people tried it the other day and indexed about 12,000 images from the Murray Cemetery in one day.
What do you think of this idea? Do you intend to participate? I’d be interested in your comments–just post below.
I think this is a great idea and makes it even easier to participate in the mission of the church of redeeming the dead.
I will participate.
One thing that is also happening with this site is that they are sharing the index with FamilySearch, so about 4 to 6 weeks or so, they add new records to the ‘BillionGraves Index’ on FamilySearch.org. So users of FamilySearch can find records of headstones from pictures you take at cemeteries among the search results for people they are looking for on FamilySearch.
A link on the record page that comes up when you click on a result from the BillionGraves Index on FamilySearch for a person will also link back to the image on the BillionGraves website.
https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/show#uri=http://hr-search-api:8080/searchapi/search/collection/2026973
I came across this same website a few months ago. I like the idea of doing this for a Young Women project that can satisfy one of their requirements for Personal Progress. Capturing the images and uploading them to this site would not be hard and might be kind of fun to do as a Family Home Evening project! We have tons of cemeteries around where we live that have probably not been done before. I am definitely including this idea on my website: http://www.taylorsbookpub.com. Thanks for the post!