Another Successful Saturday

This weekend we held our mapping event in Sandy, Utah, USA. We spread the word as best we could to the genealogy community, and we were pleasantly surprised by some new faces among the usual suspects. We started out the day by training everyone on how to use the app, paired some people up in teams so one person could clear the headstone and one could snap photos, and quickly netted ourselves 1,163 new images in Larkin Sunset Gardens.

Our efforts were slightly overshadowed by Hokie374, who single-handedly uploaded 1,682 images this Saturday in Benton County Memorial Gardens in Arkansas, USA.

We saw a big turnout from those of you who couldn’t come to Saturday’s event by virtue of living too far away. On Saturday there were 4,810 uploads—the highest since the end of our first monthly contest in August.

1,682 images in Benton County Memorial Gardens (Arkansas, USA)

1,163 images in Larkin Sunset Gardens (Utah, USA)

863 images in National Military Cemetery (Ohio, USA)

493 images in Lehi Cemetery (Utah, USA)

137 images in Woodlawn Cemetery (Indiana, USA)

121 images in Provo City Cemetery (Utah, USA)

119 images in Hurricane City Cemetery (Utah, USA)

93 images in Riverside (Michigan, USA)

60 images in Treynor Zion Congregational Cemetery (Iowa, USA)

40 images in Wentz Cemetery (Indiana, USA)

23 images in Chiefland (Florida, USA)

6 images in Glen Haven Memorial Cemetery (Ohio, USA)

4 images in Mount Hope Cemetery (California, USA)

2 images in Riverton City Cemetery (Utah, USA)

1 image in Coney Hill Cemetery & Crematorium (England, United Kingdom)

1 image in Penrose Cemetery (Colorado, USA)

1 image in Grace Episcopal Cemetery (Maryland, USA)

1 image in Sandy City Cemetery (Utah, USA)

Thanks to everyone who contributed on Saturday (and every other day this weekend, for that matter)!

Growing Grave Records

The BillionGraves database of headstone photos and transcribed records just keeps growing, thanks to all of you. Starting this week, I’m going to post a list of all the countries you’ve been uploading from, along with lists of the states, provinces, and other sections within each country. This week we’ve had additions from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden.

This Week’s Additions

United Kingdom

• England
• Wales

United States

• Arkansas 
• California 
• Florida 
• Georgia 
• Hawaii 
• Idaho 
• Illinois 
• Indiana 
• Iowa 
• Kentucky 
• Louisiana 
• Maine 
• Maryland 
• Massachusetts 
• Michigan 
• Minnesota 
• Nebraska 
• New York 
• North Carolina 
• Ohio 
• Oklahoma 
• Oregon 
• Pennsylvania 
• South Carolina 
• South Dakota 
• Texas
• Utah

Sweden

• Skåne 
• Västra Götaland

Newest T-shirt Winners

Along with our new photos and records, we also have some new t-shirt winners. Congratulations!

• smflatness (1697 images)
• Gayle (1154 transcriptions)
• sadie63 (1020 transcriptions)
• Jeremyeguzman (1005 transcriptions)
• Simini (1080 transcriptions)
• waynedaz (1076 transcriptions)

Mapping Even Tomorrow

Last of all, don’t forget that tomorrow is the mapping even in Sandy, Utah, USA. If you’re in the Wasatch Front are or know someone who is, set your reminders. We’ll see you at Larkin Sunset Gardens at 9:00 a.m.!

Transcribing for Posterity

Recently BillionGraves crossed the 200,000-record mark, and the number it still climbing. In light of all these available records, I thought I’d revisit some points on how to give the best you can while you’re transcribing.

The most important part about transcribing is remembering that you’re trying to make sure as much information as possible gets into the searchable fields. Our search engine can’t search images; it can only search words. The more information you get into typed-up words, the more information the search engine can sort through to help people find their families.

With that in mind, most of these points will be apparent.

• Transcribe every part of the name and as much of a date as you can. This is going to be one of the most important things you can do because names and dates are the first way researchers will try to locate someone.
• Transcribe the ages of the deceased individual (if it is written on the stone). Some headstones or grave markers provide only one date: either the birth date or the death date. However, many of these stones will say how old the individual was in years, and possibly even months and days as well. This information is as important as a date. It will help researchers narrow their search in other records besides the headstone.
• Transcribe the epitaph if you can at all read it (and if there is one on the stone).* It is less likely that a descendant will be using the epitaph to search for someone. However, because epitaphs are typically complete phrases, they are sometimes easier to remember than names and dates. Someone searching for a stone they once visited might be able to remember the epitaph and not the name.
• Transcribe any other information you can get off the stone. Any of the stone’s information could be helpful in finding an individual’s grave and in recording it for posterity. If you can read it, please put it in your transcription, even if you aren’t sure what it means.
• Transcribe headstones in their native language. If you would like to provide a translation into your own language, you may do so in the Description field. However, the transcription information should include the headstone information as it appears on the stone. That is the primary goal of the transcription. Anything else is gravy. If you cannot transcribe the stone in its native tongue, skip it.

If you’re following those principles, other aspects of transcribing don’t matter as much. Some of you transcribe in all caps (which used to be standard in genealogy transcriptions because it saves the difficulty of figuring out what to capitalize). This is just fine, because your transcription will show up in the search just the same, and the important thing is to direct searchers to the photo. If you capitalize normally, even if the headstone is carved in all caps, that is also just fine—the transcription will show up in a search normally. The important part is to turn the headstone’s text into something the BillionGraves search engine can understand.

Thank you for all your hard work, and for pushing the records we can share above 200,000!

______________________________

*Currently the BillionGraves search engine cannot search the epitaph or description fields of a transcription, but it is something we will add eventually.

The T-shirt Deadline Approaches

August is nearly over, so if you’re anywhere near collecting 1,000 GPS-tagged photos, hurry and collect the last few you need to earn your BillionGraves t-shirt. We’ve had a few new winners since the last time I announced the list, so I’ll post it again here with the added names. (If you think you’ve uploaded 1,000 photos from the app, but you haven’t received an email from me asking for your shipping address and shirt size, email me at kristy.stewart @ billiongraves.com and let me know.)

• dswillet
• Gableboy
• Mitchowl
• PapaMoose
• ValerieC84
• GeneologyMaster
• Hokie374
• tjalbrecht
• lady0rowan
• DdraigGoch
• crex
• Anne Ryan
• Bmathis
• Rbemis01
• MichaelMcCormick
• Chynna67
• Vickytb
• TaraDuncan
• Chrisser
• Joe&Murphy
• waterfreak2009
• huntingsage
• grave_hopper
• shetler

If you have a smartphone with true GPS, you still have time to collect 1,000 headstone photos. Upload your photos by 11:59 p.m. UTC and you’ll have won yourself a BillionGraves t-shirt.

More Graves, More Winners

The number of graves you have all mapped out and transcribed is climbing faster than ever—even slow upload days are higher than the average we had before August. You have all really stepped up to the plate on this, and the number of individuals who have earned their t-shirt is growing apace. We have 19 t-shirt winners, and there’s still more than a week left! Here’s a list of our current winners:

• dswillet
• Gableboy
• Mitchowl
• PapaMoose
• ValerieC84
• GeneologyMaster
• Hokie374
• tjalbrecht
• lady0rowan
• DdraigGoch
• crex
• Anne Ryan
• Bmathis
• Rbemis01
• MichaelMcCormick
• Chynna67
• Vickytb
• TaraDuncan

The Leaderboard gives us a glimpse of all the transcribers who are taking the uploaded photos and making them searchable. Right now the lowest number of transcriptions on the Leaderboard (which now extends to 25 instead of 10) is 325; the highest is a whopping 10,170 transcriptions from RWhisnant! And even with RWhisnant’s astounding numbers, we’ve had so many uploads that there are still over 5800 images available to transcribe. This is an amazing month for cemetery record collection.

Top-Notch Transcribers

Yesterday was a landmark day for the transcribers: there were more records transcribed yesterday than ever before (and the gap between yesterday and every other day was sizeable). Those transcriptions put us over a major milestone: 100,000 records. Each of those records belongs to someone’s family member, and now they’re easy to find for anyone who’s looking for them.

We’ve had some more photo collectors cross the 1,000-photo finish line as well: tjalbrecht, Hokie374, GeneologyMaster, ValeriC84, and PapaMoose (though PapaMoose assures me that his nephew was actually taking many of the photos while he was clearing off the stones, so he’s going to give his t-shirt to Helpful Nephew). These collectors have been a part of a huge spike in photo uploads.

Those photos have been uploaded from all over, and here’s a sample of the areas we’ve gotten photos from in the past two days, divided by continent.

North America

• Alabama, USA 
• California, USA 
• Idaho, USA 
• Louisiana, USA 
• Michigan, USA 
• New York, USA 
• Ohio, USA 
• Ontario, Canada 
• Pennsylvania, USA 
• South Carolina, USA 
• Texas, USA 
• West Virginia, USA 

Europe 

• Wales, UK 
• Stockholm, Sweden

Australia 

• Canterbury, New Zealand

Many of these areas have even had more than one of their cemeteries updated in the past two days, so we’ve had a lot of additions. Thanks, everyone!

August Uploads and Solar Storms

Thanks to so many of you, yesterday was the second largest uploading day BillionGraves has ever seen (the biggest uploading day coincided with our first cemetery event). We saw photos from all over pour into the database, and we appreciate every one of them.

One person who significantly contributed to the uploading spike was user DSWILLET (he or she doesn’t capitalize the username; I do that because whoever this is deserves more than all lowercase letters). This morning DSWILLET tops the Leaderboard with 1,014 images uploaded since August 1. A small portion of those photos—about 250—were uploaded using the new uploading feature we’re testing, so they don’t have GPS tags on them. But DSWILLET is only 239 images away from the 1,000-photo threshold, and it’s only August 5.

There are other users who are well on their way to the 1,000-image mark, and we haven’t even hit a weekend yet. Thank you all for mapping out your local cemeteries.

In not-as-fun news, there is a possibility that GPS systems will be a bit glitchy this weekend. There have been three large solar flares recently, and the resulting coronal mass ejection (CME) could toy with radio traffic, power grids, and satellites. That isn’t to say everything related to GPS will break down for a few days, but if your GPS isn’t working the way it should, blame the sun, wait it out a day or two, and try again. If you’re close enough to the poles to see the auroras, enjoy the light show. I wish it could come as far south as Utah.

Testers Needed for a New Feature

In the past, we on the BillionGraves team have gotten a lot of requests to allow photo uploads from devices that aren’t smartphones. We’ve always answered by saying that we want the information on BillionGraves to be as precise as possible, especially on details like the location of a headstone. We’ve also been neck deep in making the smartphone–website transition smoother and making the smartphone apps the best they can be.

However, a couple of the developers have had some time to put together a way to upload photos that are saved to your computer from a non-smartphone device.

Once these photos are uploaded, they will display in the search results, but they will be secondary to photos that have precise GPS locations from the mobile app. If a headstone photo is first uploaded from another source, and then later someone uploads a photo of it using the app, those two photos can be merged under one record and you’ll be able to see in the search results that the headstone’s location is verified.

(Speaking of merging photos, we’ve almost finished our system to merge duplicate images and records. Once we have that in place and have caught up on the current collection of duplicates, each record will only appear in the search results once.)

Before we open the new uploader to everyone on BillionGraves, we want to test it with a smaller group of individuals to make sure everything is working properly. If you have a collection of headstone photos you’d like to contribute to BillionGraves and you’re willing to play the guinea pig for a bit, email support@billiongraves.com. We’ll open it up to a small group and once we’re sure it works, we’ll open it up to everyone.

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 news items. This window will display new batches of images, recently added cemeteries, new blog posts, and other items of interest.

The activity monitor will make it easier to see when there’s progress in the BillionGraves effort. (When the photo collectors and transcribers are keeping pace with each other, it’s hard to tell that anything’s happening.) It can also help you see when cemeteries and photos are added to areas that pertain to your research.

New batches of photos and cemetery additions may take some time to reach the activity monitor. Cemeteries need to be approved before they show up in searches or in the monitor, and we don’t want to report a batch of photos before the whole collection has been uploaded (otherwise the news feed will be full of announcements of 1–2 photos when a single 498-photo announcement would have done just as well). Even though the new items won’t strictly be in real time, they’ll still be an easy way to keep your fingers on the BillionGraves pulse.

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 as not to be forgotten. But when you’re visiting a cemetery and you have the BillionGraves app along with you, don’t miss your opportunity to record all the people surrounding your specific someone. The app is quick and easy, so it shouldn’t slow you down much to collect photos of the headstones you pass on your way into or out of the cemetery. There are a few photos uploaded to the site that look awfully lonely—only one or two pins mark the only photos collected from a particular cemetery.

Next time, take some extra time and record the surrounding stones. You don’t need to map out the whole cemetery (heaven knows that some cemeteries are too big for hours of mapping out, no matter how fast the tool), but map out the chunk you have time for. Each one of those headstones belongs to a specific someone that another researcher or descendant has ties to. Help them find their connections.

Below are a few wonderful examples. The first is East Lawn Memorial Hills in Provo, Utah, USA. The clump of pins is only part of a cemetery, but it’s a grouping that took one person just over an hour to do. It would be easy to map out this chunk, leave, and come back to finish when you had more time to spare.

This next example is from Skållerud (Bränna) in Mellerud, Sweden. The individual working on this cemetery added it to our database and mapped out what appears to be the entire thing—250 photos. Two-hundred fifty photos is not an incomprehensible number when we’re talking about using the smartphone app, but it took this person special time and attention to map out this small cemetery in Sweden.

On a slightly smaller scale, here is another new contribution from Vaucluse, Australia. The person working on this cemetery added it to our database and mapped out a few rows of grave markers. It’s 122 photos, and it’s already an awesome start on South Head Cemetery. It’s a substantial number of stones, and it’ll be easy to come back and finish the rest later.

Thank you to everyone who records stones with the BillionGraves app, but a special thank you to those who take the extra time to record not only those people you’re looking for, but the ancestors of others who can use the work you’ve completed.

In a Dozen Days

It’s always interesting to see your progress, regardless of the task at hand. So we’re posting a progress report for BillionGraves. Here are our numbers after the first dozen days of work:

Photos: 8084+ (variation allowed for the time it took me to write this)
Records: 11108+ (the number keeps changing each time I check it)
Photos awaiting transcription: 500–600 (this number also keeps changing)

There are more records than photos because a record refers to one individual’s information. So a couple that is buried under the same monument produces two records, one for each individual. Some of these individuals, like Carl J. Anderson (Provo City Cemetery, Utah, U.S.A.), I wasn’t able to find on the major grave registration sites. Now they’re available for current and future descendants. While these numbers are still relatively small, they represent a strong 12-days introduction.

We’re not sure how many cemeteries have been added to the database since the launch because once we approve an added cemetery, it becomes identical to the cemeteries we originally had on file. I can, however, tell you about the cemeteries we have in the queue for approval. There are currently 16 of them.

• 13 are in the United States, and they come from 8 different states.
• 1 is in Ontario, Canada.
• 1 is in United Kingdom, England specifically.
• 1 is in Croatia.

(Side note: The approval process goes much faster if cemeteries are added with phones that are currently in the cemetery.)

Together, everyone using BillionGraves has, on average, made the headstones of 925 individuals available to descendants worldwide each day the site has been up and running. I wish I could thank you all individually for the contributions you’ve already made, both in photos and in transcriptions, but for now a sweeping “Thank you all” will have to do. We’re hopeful that more and more people will find and contribute to BillionGraves, and the numbers can only go up.