While playing with my iPhone the other day, I found an app under genealogy called Billion Graves. The description for the app explained that you could use your GPS-enabled phone to take pictures of headstones and upload them to their webpage, where you or others could then transcribe the information from the picture. Within the app, many cemeteries are already loaded, ready for input and others can be added easily on the fly. Because the application uses the GPS coordinates to catalog the pictures, any pictures taken from within a cemetery are automatically catalogued properly to the right cemetery.

Think about that for a minute. The app only creates a record for a headstone within a particular cemetery when a picture exists taken from within that cemetery. This could virtually eliminate the multiple entries for the same cemetery that exist in some of the current sites, such a s Find-A-Grave, as well as letting folks find the cemeteries easily using the mobile app, or from the site itself in a browser.

So, I downloaded the app onto my phone and took a short drive to a nearby graveyard. When I arrived, the app zeroed in on my position and the pictures I took were all added to the right cemetery without my having to do anything at all. Very nice.

When I got back to the house, I let my phone re-connect itself to the home network and let the app upload the photos to the Billion Graves server. I could have uploaded the pictures while still at the cemetery, but didn’t want to use up too much bandwidth on the phone for this test. Several dozen photos only took a few moments to upload. Once they were uploaded, I went to the website and transcribed them, but I also could have left them out there for others to transcribe instead.

All in all, it’s a quick way to document cemeteries easily and eliminates a number of problems that currently plaque existing programs of this type. I can see quite clearly how a small group of folks with modern phones could quickly document an entire cemetery very quickly. Or just stop on your way home from work or the store and snap a few pictures to help build the database. The app has been running for only a few months now, but there are already over 200,000 records online – that’s pretty impressive!