Friday, June 10, 2011

IPhone/Android app for cemetery transcription

Have you seen this new site: www.billiongraves.com?

They have an iPhone/Android app where you can take pictures of graves while at acemetery, upload the picture from your phone to billiongraves site with GPS coordinates (!) and then you and/or the research community will transcribe the grave records. The site is only three weeks old, so they're working on a lot of improvements, but I think it's a great start! If you don't have time to go to cemetery to take photos, you can help transcribe user submitted photos. 

I was hoping findagrave would come out with a similar app...maybe they still will. In the meantime, I'm going to start using BillionGraves

Melissa

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

New Web search feature on ancestry.com

In Ancestry.com's monthly newsletter for July, an announcement was made about a new search feature: Web search.

If you are searching for family on ancestry.com, ancestry will now search web results in addition to their indexed and archived records. If your search generates a web record, ancestry will provide a link to the website. This way the website still gets traffic. Ancestry also provides a citation, so the website will get proper credit for their hard work. Ancestry users (no membership required for web search) can save the information found from the web search directly to their tree with the proper citation.

Right now there are only five or six websites participating, such as obits on rootsweb, during this trial run. (note: Websites not interested in participating can opt out and/or remove themselves from the search.)

Ancestry explains the process a lot better than I ever could, so check it out here:

http://boards.ancestry.com/content-publishers-feedback/3/mb.ashx

I'd love to see more sites participate, as I think this is a wonderful addition to ancestry.com.

I'd love to see more of rootsweb pages, findagrave, internment.net, the US Cemeteries Project, and more.

Which sites would you like to see added?

Melissa

Note: The thoughts expressed in this post are my own. Although I am a paid subscriber of ancestry.com, I was in no way paid or offered incentives to post...just a happy customer :)