Billion Graves

There dozens of cemeteries in your county, and thousands of cemeteries in your state. Hundreds of thousands of cemeteries in the country, and millions of cemeteries across the world. This means that there there are billions of graves. Each one representing a real person, who lived their life, they loved their family, and their family loved them. Then they died.

As a family historian there is much to be gained from visiting a cemetery. Often headstones contain valuable information on birth and death dates. The position within a cemetery can reveal family relationships. You can even find relatives you didn't know existed because their lives fell between censuses, and there is no other record of their short life. But getting to each cemetery where your ancestors are deposited can be a logistical and monetary nightmare.

That is where BillionGraves.com comes in. There are people who live near where your ancestors are buried. People who have smart phones and iPhones, and Androids, and well, whatever they are called. BillionGraves.com has developed an app for your phone that allows you to snap a quick picture of a headstone and then upload it (along with the GPS coordinates) for others (or yourself) to transcribe. It then becomes searchable through their website (http://www.billiongraves.com) and through FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org)

Recently some of the scouts from our church's troop did a service project and mapped half of an older country cemetery in about 2.5 hours. There were four of us, and it was numbingly cold outside (so cold the screen stopped recognizing our fingers as fingers!)

So how can you help yourself and others? Log on to BillionGraves.com, create an account, then download the app if you have one of those fancy-new-fangled phones, or your can transcribe headstone images that others upload.

There are headstones from everywhere from Europe to Utah, Florida to Newfoundland. So get online and get working!

Family History FANatic

Family History is clearly a passion of mine. But I am also a big FAN of using a fan chart.

A fan chart is a way to look at your family history that allows you to see where research opportunities are. The closer those research opportunities are to you, the more apparent they become.

BEHOLD THE FAN CHART! ALL MUST QUAKE IN MUTED REVERENCE BEFORE THE MIGHTY CHART...sorry I got carried away.

If you picture the fan chart as being a baseball diamond. You are standing at home plate, your father's family is along the 3rd base line, your father's mother's family is in left-center field, your mother's father's family is in right-center field, and your mother's mother's line is along the first base line.

So you can see from the image above, there is some gaps, or blank areas where there is no data present. This is a beginning spot to do research.

To create a fan chart you can go to createfan.com  in addition, you need to have a familysearch.org account with user data in it in order to pull something up.

So check it out and fan the flames of family history in your life!