Here Lies Project
Individual burials can be difficult to find. The tombstones are slowly fading away. We want to help people preserve their family history.
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 01, 2015
Today, the Here Lies Project, a community-driven project to catalog the locations of gravesites around the world, announced they have launched their iOS and Android app. The app allows individuals to catalog gravesites by using their mobile device’s GPS to find their current location and take photos and enter details of tombstones.
“The app was something I decided to develop after talking with fellow genealogy lovers,” said creator, Ryan Vinson. “Small family cemeteries around the world are aging poorly and in many cases, the original family no longer owns the land. Individual burials can be difficult to find. The tombstones are slowly fading away. We want to help people preserve their family history.”
Unlike other gravesite location apps, Here Lies allows users to select gravesite locations based on GPS location, not a preselected list of cemeteries. Users may pinpoint their current location using their mobile device’s GPS, add a photo of the tombstone, first and last name of the deceased, year of death, and any additional information they find helpful or interesting. The app also shows the locations of gravesites already in the database that are nearby.
“My brother and I had tried tracking our family’s gravesites, but we had trouble finding a lot of the locations as we only had public records to go off of,” said Vinson. “I wanted to help my fellow genealogists find their family with ease, so we decided to open the app to the community to help fill out the database with markers outside traditional cemeteries.”
While there are many tools available to the public to help them locate their specific families, Vinson hopes that in addition to preserving legacies, the app will encourage the community to enrich themselves in the history around them and track potentially unknown gravesites as they travel and explore.
Though the app is new, Vinson is already planning for the future. He plans to build out additional language capabilities so that users worldwide are more able to contribute.
Users can download the app by visiting http://www.herelies.io, or directly from the iTunes and Google Play app stores.
About the Here Lies Project: The Here Lies Project was founded by Ryan Vinson in an effort to help people worldwide locate gravestones of friends and family members. The community-driven project invites users to upload gravestones both inside and outside cemeteries to be added to the current database.