Utah company's new smartphone app will enhance genealogy access while on the fly

CINCINNATI — Otter Creek Holdings, a Utah-based technology company that develops genealogy software and websites, sent a team of its techies to a monument trade-show in Cincinnati last week to present new software they've built into a soon-to-be released smartphone application, "Legacy Mobile."

The app gives cemetery wonderers the power to link up to genealogical information on the dead by simply snapping a quick photo of a particular gravesite's monument from the app's interface.

Instead of searching "a billion records at a time," the app uses GPS metadata on uploaded photos to filter search results to a particular cemetery or city, said Hudson Gunn, vice president Otter Creek Holdings' business development.

But that's just half the tech-sauce. Next, Gunn says, a customized image recognition technology compares the uploaded photo to a database of gravestone photos from sites like billiongraves.com, which will then connect the user to information on the deceased from megadata partner sites like ancestry.com and familysearch.org.

The "Legacy Mobile" app, which is free and advertisement-free, is expected to be released within the next week.