Event: Holiday Weekend Cemetery Mapping
This Sunday in Utah (USA) is a holiday called Pioneer Day, when Utahns celebrate the pioneers who first trekked across America’s Great Plains and into the Rocky Mountains to settle the valleys of northern Utah. In case you weren’t already aware, the BillionGraves team is…
Cemetery News Feed
Now you can see all the BillionGraves activity from your dashboard. We’ve added an activity monitor and news feed to the BillionGraves website. Once you log in, you’ll see your dashboard, and in the window just below your profile picture is a set of scrolling…
Android Update: Add a Cemetery
The initial launch of the Android app featured a bare-bones essentials version: it could find your local cemeteries and it could collect photos, but it couldn’t add cemeteries to the database while mobile (though we add cemeteries manually for any BillionGraves user who notifies us of…
Deciphering Swedish Stones
You may have noticed that there are a lot of headstone photos being collected in Sweden. If you don’t understand Swedish, these photos may be too baffling to transcribe—and if you’re like me, you don’t like having to skip a photo just because of something…
Smartphones in the Summer Swelter
This weekend many of you went out and collected cemetery photos, and speedy transcribers have already made many of those photos searchable. (There are still about 2800 photos—go transcribe!) Some of the photo-collectors may have run into some of the hiccups we hit over one…
Server Switch Tonight
Tonight between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. MDT (GMT-6), BillionGraves.com will take a short break from service and migrate to a new server. This server will be faster and larger than our current server, and it will be very easy to increase its size to accommodate the growing…
Transcribing Tips & Tricks
Transcribing photos on BillionGraves is a fairly simple process. You put as much information as possible into the appropriate fields (Given Names, Family Names, etc.), and you then put anything that doesn’t fit into the free-text boxes that appear after you click “Add Description.” There…
Transcribing Tips & Tricks
Transcribing photos on BillionGraves is a fairly simple process. You put as much information as possible into the appropriate fields (Given Names, Family Names, etc.), and you then put anything that doesn’t fit into the free-text boxes that appear after you click “Add Description.” There…
Top the Leaderboard: Track Your Stats
The Android app isn’t the only thing we’ve been building over the past few weeks: we’re also improving the way we track photos, records, and cemeteries. A lot of what we’ve done keeps the database running smoother and you’ll never have to see it. But…
Now Available for Android
For everyone waiting on the Android app, it’s here! The app is free in the Android Market (and it will be in the Amazon Appstore for Android very soon). The app has all the essentials: it will find cemeteries that are close to you and…
Make the Most of Your Cemetery Visit
When you visit a cemetery, you’re usually looking for or visiting someone specific. This someone is most likely near and dear to your heart, or at least marginally tied to your blood. It makes sense that you’d want that specific someone to be recorded so…
iPhone App Update
Version 1.1 of the iPhone app was approved by Apple yesterday, and here’s what it has under the hood: The camera will not take photos without an accurate GPS fix. This will ensure you have the most accurate GPS location possible for all your photos because…