August 21, 2013
I recently wrote the article Top Genealogy Websites, Pt. 3: Burial & Cemetery Records, which included a discussion of BillionGraves.com. This handy website provides an app that can be used to find the burial site of a relative.
Let’s look into this a little more.
BillionGraves is a free Internet site that encourages genealogists, Boy Scouts and local cemetery buffs to take photographs of the tombstones in their local cemetery and upload the pictures online using the free BillionGraves app.
This is really easy to do.
Remember—you’ll need a Smartphone to take these cemetery photos or find a gravesite already photographed.
Why? Because BillionGraves not only adds the photo of each tombstone, it includes the GPS coordinates to the spot where that person is buried. It has harnessed technology to make it easy to permanently record the photograph—linked to the GPS data used by Smartphones—so that anyone can quickly find the tombstone. This nifty app makes it so much easier to find what cemetery—or where in that cemetery—someone is buried.
How does this work?
Watch this short video clip of Tom Hester showing how easy it is to do this.
How do you find a grave using BillionGraves?
What if you’re looking for a particular grave and there is no cemetery office? No sexton available? No map to cemetery burials?
We’ve all walked cemeteries for hours searching for our deceased relatives’ graves.
BillionGraves is changing that.
With BillionGraves you can quickly find out if someone has uploaded a photo of your ancestor’s grave. With its GPS feature, your Smartphone can lead you right to it.
Watch how “Casey and Jake” found the grave of their 8th-great-grandmother using the Smartphone app.
Harness the information in both BillionGraves and GenealogyBank and you can fill in the details of your family tree.
For example, let’s say you are researching your ancestor Lionel Starbird.
On GenealogyBank you can quickly find the core genealogical information about Lionel Starbird—his name, date of birth and date/place of death—and by searching for him on BillionGraves you can see a photo of his grave. Notice that BillionGraves links all of the photos in a family plot to his record.
It’s a great day for genealogy!
Read these other articles about top genealogy websites:
Top Genealogy Websites Pt. 1: Google
Top Genealogy Websites Pt. 2: Google Books & Internet Archive
Cemeteries and grave site locations is becoming more important every day with the amount of cremations being performed today. I would assume that most cremains are interred, but many are not. This will be a problem to genealogy in the future.
I love the idea of using GPS to locate and mark graves due to years of searching hot cemeteries and climbing through bushes, etc. But as the retired coordinator of the Yolo County CAGenWeb Project web site, as I compiled the “cemetery” section for the web site, I was asked a few times not to include the location of a few of the old Yolo County, Calif., cemeteries because they feared vandalism. They were willing to tell private parties where the cemeteries were located, but they did not want the locations placed online. Can you turn the GPS off on your phone or camera when needed? I haven’t tried that yet.
Interesting question Peggy. Do you think vandals would use GPS to track down their targets? I’ve always assumed that these lowlifes went after targets of opportunity rather then specific cemeteries. What are you seeing there in Yolo County?
There’s an app for findagrave too… not as robust as billiongraves but hopefully updated soon.
I’m not sure what app your referring to, Stachia, but there is no Find-A-Grave app. Unless I missed it somewhere?