New Developments in BillionGraves.com

Every once and while, I find a new development in a program that adds significantly to the research process. That is the case with the new BillionGraves.com Plus program. Searching on BillionGraves.com remains essentially free, but the new subscription plan adds some remarkable tools to the BillionGraves.com arsenal. The Plus program appears as a new tab on the startup page of the program. Here is a screenshot:

When you search for a person or a cemetery, you get several new options. For example, if I search for my Grandfather's grave in St. Johns, Arizona, I get the following screen:

Then I click on the results and get the following options and information:

Starting in the upper left-hand corner, I can view this person in FamilySearch.org's Family Tree program, I can go on a virtual walkthrough of the cemetery looking for people buried anywhere in the cemetery, and I can search for additional Tanner burials.

By clicking on the virtual walkthrough, I get the following screen:

There are several really interesting and helpful options. First there is an areal view of the cemetery with an adjustable circle. All of the graves in the program inside of that circle are listed in the box on the lower left. By adjusting the size of the circle, I can include more or less names in the box. If I click on a name, the location of that grave shows up on the map. Here is a screenshot showing that feature:

Here I found my Great-grandmother, Margaret Godfrey Jarvis Overson's burial. If I click on the tag on the map, I can then go directly to the entry for her burial.

Clicking on her name in the label, takes me to her burial page:

This way I can move around the cemetery seeing exactly where everyone in my family is buried. I can also use this function to look for anyone I may not know who is buried in the same cemetery. Of course, this whole process requires that someone has taken photos and that the information has been transcribed. When I get to my Great-grandmother's page, I see that a search for Oversons would show 43 additional people. Here is the screen I get when I do that search:

Clicking on any one of the names takes me to that person's burial page and the process can continue. I am really impressed with this technology. This whole process is enabled because BillionGraves.com records the GPS coordinates of the graves at the time the photos are taken.