Gilad Japhet, the CEO of MyHeritage.com, has personally taken nearly 5000 gravestone photos so far this year and then he and the MyHeritage staff organized the digitization of the gravestones in Israel's largest cemetery, with over 200,000 graves. This super-organized effort resulted in approximately 150,000 photos being uploaded to BillionGraves.com in one day. See Digitizing Cemeteries: MyHeritage is at it again (with friends)!. Quoting from the announcement:
As part of the global initiative we launched with BillionGraves earlier this year, the MyHeritage team recruited a group of enthusiastic volunteers to continue our efforts to digitize cemeteries.
After successfully digitizing a medium sized cemetery of historical significance earlier this year (see video), we decided to undertake our biggest challenge yet - to digitize Israel's largest cemetery - with over 200,000 graves. So earlier this week, we embarked on a one-of-a-kind project to photograph all headstones of the huge Holon cemetery in central Israel.
This was one of largest events of its kind ever organized - in the world!MyHeritage's goal is to digitize all the cemeteries in the world and Gilad Japhet is certainly not afraid to get out there and set an example. Please take the time to review the entire blog post from MyHeritage. It will give you an idea of what can be done.
The best aspect of the event was the true collaboration between MyHeritage and all leading genealogy organizations in Israel, in addition to MyHeritage power users. In total, some 120 people joined our initiative and participated, and approximately 150,000 gravestone photos were taken throughout the day! It was heart warming to see such collaboration among so many people who care about genealogy, from all ages, and all groups, working together to create an incredible resource that is free for all to use.
How wonderful! Please keep going, Gilad
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