MyHeritage, BillionGraves to digitalize world's cemeteries

MyHeritage CEO Gilad Japhet: Cemeteries worldwide have never been documented, and their information is not available online.

MyHeritage Ltd. has teamed up with BillionGraves to launch a global crowdsourcing initiative to preserve the world’s cemeteries by digitalizing them.

BillionGraves is a free app for iPhones and Android devices that lets users photograph and document gravestones, providing an important source of information for people intrigued about their ancestors and family history. Using patent-pending technology, BillionGraves is the only mobile application of its kind. With the help of MyHeritage, the app will be available in 25 languages, and will support Gregorian, Hebrew, and Julian dates. It records the GPS locations of gravestones to make them easy to find and volunteers can easily see which areas of any cemetery remain undocumented, to maximize efficiency and avoid duplication. The gravestone photographs are then transcribed by volunteers on the BillionGraves website, resulting in searchable digital data.

With a community of tens of millions of family history enthusiasts all around the world, MyHeritage brings a vast global volunteer base for collecting and transcribing gravestone photos using the BillionGraves application.

All records collected are made available for free on the BillionGraves and MyHeritage websites. The partnership with BillionGraves brings major benefits for families using MyHeritage to explore their past, as all users will receive free Record Matches - alerts about gravestone records that have been automatically matched to their ancestors, making it easy to make new discoveries. In addition to the photographs and GPS coordinates of the gravestones, an index of corresponding information, such as dates of birth and death, close family relatives and epitaphs, is made available to search for free on MyHeritage's search engine for historical records, SuperSearch.

“We’re thrilled to embark on this global initiative with BillionGraves," said MyHeritage CEO Gilad Japhet. “Gravestones are among the most valuable information sources for family history research, and although there are many thousands of cemeteries worldwide, most of them have never been documented, and their information is not available online. Time is chipping away at the gravestones and many are becoming unreadable over the years, so it’s up to our generation to preserve them.

BillionGraves president Hudson Gunn said, “At BillionGraves we are working to provide a comprehensive family history database for records and images from the world’s cemeteries, but it’s not something we can do alone. With MyHeritage’s support in mobilizing its massive user community and working with us to launch in 25 languages, we’ll be able to provide incredible value for millions of families and preserve this valuable data for generations to come.”

Over the coming weeks, MyHeritage users will receive documentation about the project and will be able to download the application via a special website designed for this project.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on February 20, 2014

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