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Tuesday, March 11, 2014

MyHeritage.com kick-starts agreement with BillionGraves.com



I got the following email message from Daniel Horowitz, Chief Genealogist and Translation Manager for MyHeritage.com concerning their support of BillionGraves.com. I think you will find this very, very interesting:
I wanted to let you know that the MyHeritage Israel team just kick-started our global initiative that we recently announced together with BillionGraves, to digitally preserve the world's cemeteries.
We decided that it was important to go out as a team and experience the process of photographing and documenting gravestones using the BillionGraves app, and so 80 members of the MyHeritage team went on a grey and cloudy Sunday morning to the local cemetery - Segula - located in Petah Tikva, Israel. In just 3 hours we captured over 50,000 gravestone images and completed nearly 70% of the entire cemetery.
It was the largest event of its kind ever held in Israel. In fact, BillionGraves told us that this was the largest single-day cemetery project held so far using the BillionGraves app. With the fast pace growth of the app, it is sure to be surpassed soon with other similar cemetery projects.
As we know, most of the world's cemeteries have never been systematically documented nor has their information made available online. In addition, age and exposure to the elements are rendering gravestones illegible, making this project even more urgent. This initiative is really important for genealogists and for everyone in order to make family history available to all. We are calling on people around the world to join us in this project, and we are happy to help and guide people in the process with advice and resources. We invite everyone to visit http://billiongraves.com/myheritage to register and download the application. This will help millions of people to discover the final resting place of their ancestors and relatives and the information it includes. Please read more about our activity in the official blog post: http://blog.myheritage.com/2014/03/myheritage-employees-digitize-an-entire-cemetery-to-kickstart-global-initiative/
This is a remarkable effort and I am sure all those with relatives buried in that cemetery will appreciate the effort. You absolutely need to read the entire blog post.

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