BillionGraves Cemetery Project
April 25, 2019
By Katie Ward
Would you like to be a part of a project to document all the graves in our local cemetery? And – in the process, help clean up our cemetery before Memorial Day? A BillionGraves Cemetery Event is scheduled for April 29, 2019, starting at 12:30 p.m. in conjunction with Community Clean-Up Day.
BillionGraves is the world’s largest resource for searchable GPS cemetery data, with a goal of documenting every gravesite in the world with digitized headstone photos. It works like this: Volunteers use smartphones to take GPS-tagged photos of headstones. The photos are uploaded to the BillionGraves website where they are transcribed by volunteers (often the same people who took the photos). They can then be easily accessed for research online. Since BillionGraves has partnered with other companies like FamilySearch, MyHeritage and FindMyPast, anyone doing family history research has ready access to photos of their ancestors’ grave markers.
Don’t have a smartphone? No problem! Volunteers will work in teams of 3 – only one of whom needs a smartphone. The grass will need to be trimmed around the headstones, and the stones gently cleaned before photos are taken. Also, after each photo is taken, the grave will be marked off on a chart of the cemetery so that none will be overlooked.
If you are interested in participating, please contact Katie Ward (935-2979), Julie Riley (436-2424) or Karen Amende (436-2047).
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