Cemetery Tales #1

There is a great app that I found on my smart phone. It's called BillionGraves. I was just browsing through the apps one day and saw this one. I've always kind of had a thing for trompsing through cemeteries, so my interest was peaked.

With this application you can go to a headstone and take a picture using your GPS capable smartphone. The picture is then linked to a GPS coordinate so that anyone finding the picture will know exactly where it is. You can also link the picture of the front of the headstone with the picture of the back with just a little tap on the screen. These pictures are then uploaded to the website billiongraves.com. On the website you can go in and transcribe the words of the headstone. This will go into a searchable database that anyone can access. If you just want to take photos and upload them, other volunteers can go in and do the transcriptions. If you don't want to get tendonitis of the foot you can just go to the website and start transcribing. There are people all over the world contributing to this. It's kind of fun to go in and see where the latest uploads are coming from.

I got really excited about helping with the project. I got my phone all set up, read all the helpful hints (which weren't totally necessary as I ignore a lot of them) and took off for my local cemetery.

Now do you want to know what happened on my very first day? Something very syncronistic. I was walking from grave to grave, pausing briefly to lean over and snap the photo and I saw out of the corner of my eye this large group of people walking down the road next to the cemetery. I was feeling a little bit self-conscious and foolish and tried to not look at them.

One of the guys in the group called over to me, "hey, do you mind me asking what you're doing?" So I swallowed my pride and told him. He said, "I thought that's what you were doing, but I thought, Noooo, what are the chances?" Apparently this guy was one of the developers of the app and was just in town visiting family.