Genealogy Articles

Competition for Find a Grave? Unlikely. However, there is an interesting new app out there for your smart phone that raises some serious questions. BillionGraves.com is now offering an application for your smart phone that allows you to take pictures of head stones and upload them directly onto the site.

Let’s start with the pluses. First of all the main difference between this and find a grave, is the fact that when you take a picture, you are geo tagging at the same time. In other words, the GPS in your phone is using that location to mark exactly where the grave is. Therefore you cannot upload photos you already have from your computer onto the site. Also, you can only take photos with smart phones and not with digital cameras or any device without GPS.

The second advantage is the fact that you can upload the pictures directly to the site. This eliminates all the work of getting home, uploading pictures to the find a grave site one by one while transcribing all of the information. Depending on how many pictures you have, this could take hours. BillionGraves.com is asking volunteers to transcribe your photos once you have uploaded them. So if you don’t have time or don’t feel like it, someone else can do the work.

The downsides are numerous. The search engine on BillionGraves is clunky and by no means where it should be. GPS is not always accurate. As you may have experienced, GPS may think you are in one place when you are somewhere else. Currently you cannot search the database from the App. You can only use the search feature from your computer. So if you’re in the middle of a cemetery and want to look for an individual you would have to either pull up the website on your smart phone or go home to look it up.

Find a Grave currently has over 74 million graves posted. The idea of starting over again with another website or having to check one more place for a grave, gives me a headache.

This new App puts an interesting twist on things and lets us see what the future may hold.

It’s all got me anticipating an App from Find a Grave which you know must be in the works. Hurry up people!

Todd White

Founder and Principle Researcher for Family History Detective