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.

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(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)