BillionGraves: an unusual sort of crowd sourced documentation!

Billion Graves is an amazing resource! People can take photos of graves, upload them to the site with a GPS location and then transcribe the information to make it searchable. What an amazing resource for people who are researching family history. 

The website is very user friendly, there are numerous video on how to get started and proceed through various tasks. I created an account, which was very easy to do- you need a username, and email and a password, and then you must confirm from your email.

I decided to have a go at “Transcribe”- writing out the information from an existing image so that it will be searchable in the online database. You can choose which countries you are transcribing from, so I decided to go with Australia as they would (mostly) be in English.
If you want, you can limit them to a certain cemetery, say in your local area. Then you transcribe the information on the grave image that is presented. I liked that I could zoom in closer to make it easier to read, so I could be sure of getting it right. I made an error when I typed in the date of death, and the system prompted me to fix it as I had made the date earlier than birth. This would be helpful if you had put the dates in the wrong way around, perhaps if that’s how they were depicted on the grave. You can also add additional information such as ‘maiden name’ or military information, and there is the option to add another individual if there is more than one person buried (eg. A husband and wife).

When we were first talking about this in class we discussed how important the project might be as a way to retain information about relatives whereabouts, for geneology. We discussed unmarked graves and mass graves and the loss of information when a headstone gets moved or destroyed- or in the case of very old cemetaries where there may be none at all. I really like the idea that I can contribute to a body of knowledge that might help someone in the future to locate the grave of an ancestor, or perhaps in a more current way in the case of family rifts or adoption causing people to lose touch and not know where their loved ones are resting.

I would like to get out into a cemetery and have a go at collecting images with a smartphone in the future, but I think I would prefer to do it somewhere that I have a family connection. I noticed there are no images yet for either of the cemetaries in Dunedin (NZ) where I have family members, so that might be a good place to start next time I go home.