Monday, March 18, 2013

Billion Graves - Get a Team Together and Photograph a Cemetery!!

Have you ever considered getting a team of people together and taking your smart phones out and photographing an entire cemetery in one day.  With the BillionGraves app it is very easy to do.


  • Get a group together, maybe a historical society, a church group, or just a group of friends.
  • Download the app to your smartphones, the smartphone GPS's all the graves. 
  • Check BillionGraves.com and make sure your cemetery is not already photographed.
  • Go to the cemetery and decide who is taking which section.
  • Start photographing the stones, make sure you photograph the front and back and link them together.
  • When you have finished just upload the photos.
It's this easy to photograph a graveyard and get it recorded for people who live far away and recorded for history.  The photographs need to be taken with a smart phone, it is the only format they use,  It allows them to GPS each grave so others can easily find them.  After they are downloaded you can chose to go to the BillionGraves.com dashboard and transcribe them.  If you don't want to transcribe, there are many other people who just do transcribing.

If you form a team and work together, it's quick and easy to completely document an entire graveyard in a small amount of time.  If you each download your photos when you are leaving the graveyard, the photos could all be online by the time you get home.  How's that for fast and easy?  

My son and I took photographs in eleven graveyards last summer and uploaded them.  Some of them were small older graveyards, but we did a one larger one.

Please think about this!  You can help out other people and maybe someone will be putting in the graves you need.  I have had people from all over the country thank me for taking pictures of their family members stones.

BillionGraves.com also has a contest going where you can get a team together and gain points.  If you interested in this check out this page.

5 comments:

  1. Great suggestion Betty! I like the idea of getting a team together. I took a bunch on my road trip to NH and Vermont last summer. The cemeteries were quite large and I was looking for specific graves but each time, I took as many photos of graves all around my ancestors. It's really very easy and a wonderful way to give back to all those volunteers who have been diligently documenting grave yards!

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  2. That's such a great idea. I love the sound of that site!

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  3. Thanks Betty for the great idea here. This is a PERFECT way to use BillionGraves (not to mention it would be super fun)! I always have a blast doing it by myself, but with a group is even better!

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