Scanning Old Photos

When was the last time you used a film camera? I believe that most of us today take digital pictures. We tend to take digital photography for granted. We can take the picture and within a short time we post them to websites such as Picasa, flickr, Facebook, or any number of other sites. We also e-mail copies to friends, send copies on CD, print them with portable printers before we leave, or send them via camera phones to all our friends. But I bet everyone of us still has boxes or books full of pictures and slides. We need to do something with these photos to make them more useful in our research and to make sure that they can be shared with the family. 

I bet most of you have a scanner sitting on your desk. I have gone through at least a dozen scanners over the last few years. My wife and I used to have our own business scanning other people's pictures. That worked well during the mid 1990's when scanning and printing technology was more expensive. We had scanners for slides, scanners for photos and scanners for large format images. At that time the scanners were stand alone flatbed scanners. Today many of the scanners are integrated into multifunction printers. 

Let's discuss some basics of scanning. When you are shopping for a scanner they always brag about how high their resolution is (dpi). Some will claim 1200, 2400, 4800, 6200 or more dpi. Bigger is better, right? Not in all cases. Truthfully, you will probably never use more that 300 dpi when scanning. You may use 600 dpi if you want to edit small areas or a few pixels at a time but then you are working with a very large size picture and it may bog down your computer processor. For web publishing 100 to 150 dpi are usually sufficient.

Another common question is what format should I save the picture in. There are dozens of possible formats given as options. Each one has a specific purpose. I generally use two different formats depending on the purpose of the picture. TIF files have great detail but they take up more storage space. JPG files look nice and take up less space but they also have less detail. If you are editing the picture I would keep it in TIF format. If you want to e-mail it or post it to the web change it to JPG.

Why would you want to scan all your pictures? The first reason is to preserve a copy of the picture. This picture was a tin-type. We don't know who the boy is yet. If you look closely you will see several cracks in the picture. We scanned the picture and put it back in the book it come from. Within a few weeks the picture had totally disintegrated into a pile of small flakes. The digital copy is all that remains of this picture now. Additionally, pictures in old adhesive photo albums are susceptible to chemical deterioration and will change color over time. Scanning allows you the opportunity to preserve them and adjust their colors to make them look more like the original photograph. 

Another reason to scan your photos is to correct any imperfections. Over time pictures discolor, get water stains, crack, bend or rip. We have had to replace many body parts on the photos we worked on. Sometimes people have wanted to modify history in different ways. We have added people to family photos and deleted people from photos. If Uncle Jim wasn't at the last holiday get together we could add him to the picture and if Aunt Jane's ex-husband was in a picture we could erase him. Generally, I don't recommend changing your genealogy related photos in this way though. But you might want to restore the missing parts.

Notice the missing corner and water stains on the photo to the left. With some fairly inexpensive graphics software you can make the picture look almost like the day it was taken. We were able to add the missing foot by taking his brother's foot and enlarging it to more closely fit his dimensions.

Another technique that I use often is to scan the entire page of pictures at once. That way you can go in, crop out the pictures one by one and save them individually. It is much quicker than lining up the scanner each time and scanning one picture at a time. Also, you eliminate the potential for damaging the photos when you take them off the adhesive backed album pages.

Scanning entire photo albums may be time consuming but just think how happy everyone will be when you hand them a CD with all of great grandma Bessie's pictures. Have fun and scan away.

Cabinet of Curiosities Blog Carnival - Family Artifacts

Show and tell for grown ups, Cabinet of Curiosities is a celebration of the oddities and marvels of natural history, anthropology, archaeology and historic interest that reside in our personal collections. Tell us the stories behind the historical or religious relics, artifacts, mementos, talismans, specimens and ephemera in your steamer trunks, sock drawers and dusty fireplace mantles. Anything that is a conversation piece is fair game for a good storyteller. What's in your attic? Remember, this is show and tell, not merely a bazarre of the bizarre. It's just an old lump of flattened lead unless you can tell us - engagingly - that this was the Minnie Ball that shattered the stock of your ancestor's Enfield at the otherwise unremarkable Battle of Bean's Station back in December of 1863. So what have you got, and what's the story?

Family artifacts and memorabilia are wonderful things. Many of us have items that have been passed down across the generations. A friend of mine has his family’s original bible from the 1770’s. My wife has a necklace that was given to her great grandmother on her wedding day. My family artifact is not in my possession but it is still in the family. This artifact was the original steamer trunk that my 3rd great grandfather Justice Wyse and his family carried over from Germany in 1854. Having this trunk in the family makes you realize that many immigrants had very little when they came to the United States. So I decided to learn more about what their voyage was like.

You may wonder where to start when doing your research on immigrants. Well that depends on when your family immigrated. In my case, since they immigrated in the 1850’s I used the database at Castle Garden (http://www.castlegarden.org). If your family immigrated in 1892 or more recently, you might try the database at Ellis Island (http://www.ellisisland.org/).

Castle Garden, today known as Castle Clinton National Monument, is the major landmark within The Battery, the 23 acre waterfront park at the tip of Manhattan. From 1855 to 1890, the Castle was America's first official immigration center, a pioneering collaboration of New York State and New York City.

Of the 10 million immigrants who entered through Castle Garden, most were German (3,425,000) and Irish (2,541,000). The rest, in descending numerical order, were English, Swedish, Italian, Scottish, Russian, Norwegian, Swiss, French, Hungarian, Danish, Austrian, Dutch, Bohemian, Welsh, Belgian, Spanish, Polish, Chinese, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, and Australian, plus 162,173 from “other countries.”

Once I found the immigration records I was able to track down the ship they immigrated on. If you want to research more on immigrant ships you could visit The Shiplist at http://www.theshiplist.com.

This picture is of the ship William Tapscott. This is the ship that the Wyse family took in their migration from Europe to the U.S. during March/April 1854. The average travel time for this voyage was about 31 days but could have taken over 45 days depending on weather. The William Tapscott was one of the finest ships of its time. It was one of the largest full-rigged ships built in Maine during the 1850's.

I was able to find more information about what a voyage on this vessel would have been like by looking in the published diaries in the BYU Digital Collection (http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu).

The ship had three decks. The passengers slept on the two lower decks. The second deck was entered through a trap-door hatchway. On each side of the deck, there were numbered cabins. Each cabin contained sleeping “berths”. Each cabin also had light from a large porthole covered with very thick blue glass. Two long tables ran down the middle of this deck. Benches, fastened to the floor, bordered these tables. When the sea wasn’t rough, the porthole window could be left open.

The bottom deck was entered by a trap-door hatchway on the second deck. Like the deck above, there were cabins with berths around the sides. There weren’t any portholes on this deck. For light, there were lanterns. It was very dark. It was described by a passenger on this deck as “… so dark that you could not see for awhile till your eyes got accustomed to the gloom.”

There was a cooking gallery for the common use of all passengers. In the center of the cooking gallery was a very large stove, about 10 feet square. Around this stove was space for passengers to stand and hold onto their pans as they cooked. The toilet closet was a large hole with a bar to sit on. A passenger described the closet as “…The only place I was frightened was when we had to go to the closet, there was just a straight stick across and of course you could see the ocean. How I did cling to my little sister when she was on that bar, for it was a large enough place to let a grown person down, let alone children.”

After plying the oceans for about forty years the William Tapscott was lost in the English Channel in 1888. The figurehead from the ship was salvaged and is now on display at the Bude-Stratton Museum in Cornwall, England. So, as my final step in researching this history, I contacted the Bude-Stratton Museum and was able to get pictures of the artifacts, including the figurehead, that were salvaged from the shipwreck.

Starting with just the one artifact, an old steamer trunk, I have now gained a much more in depth understanding of the trials that the early immigrants had to endure to come to our great country.

Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt #2

Week #2: Participate in carnivals. A blog carnival is a showcase of bloggers’ posts on a given topic. Genealogy bloggers LOVE carnivals because there’s something for everyone. To learn about when these showcase-type events are happening, read others’ genealogy blogs. Someone’s always talking about a carnival.

It took me awhile to get to this blog assignment. I had a hard time finding a carnival that I wanted to blog about but finally chose the theme "Winter Wonderland". Since we live in Florida and my wife's family has been in the Southern states since Jamestown I figured that this would be a challenge. I searched through all of our old photographs, most of which were from Florida and finally found one that represents Florida in the winter.

Here it is, a Christmas tree and the family's first radio! Based on where this picture was in the photo album it was probably taken during Christmas 1930. The previous picture was dated 1930 and the next one was 1931.

Florida is known for its mild winters and the next picture shows just how mild our climate is. This picture was taken December 27, 1929. Notice the top is down on the car.

My wife's family came to Florida in the 1850's and settled in an area they later named Yalaha in central Florida. Supposedly, Yalaha means "yellow orange" in the native Seminole language. Her family was among the first to import the orange stock into Florida. They made a good business growing oranges and asparagus ferns as is testified by several articles in the Florida Agricultural Journal during the 1890's. Additionally the captured small alligators and shipped them to Jacksonville to sell to the tourists during the 1920's.

Just to let everyone know, it does get cold in Florida. We have finally dropped out of the 70's and it is only 47 today. Hope everyone enjoys their winter and keeps warm.

Finding Records Online - Louisiana

Another week has gone by without an insightful post from me. I need to stop volunteering for so many things. Last night I worked at the Family History Center and did Cub Scouts. Today I did a job fair for students at the Academy of Coastal and Environmental Studies. Last week I did a TV spot for our local Arboretum. All this and working a regular job or two. At least I can tell those people who claim not to have enough time to do family history research that they are not nearly as busy as me ;-)

Now on to the blog for today. I am continuing my listing of state records websites. Today I move on to Louisiana. This one is a little difficult for me since I have not done any research here and therefore have not used the online databases as much as some of the others.

Louisiana has several records indexes online. All of these sites require you to order the actual record for $2 to $5 per copy so you want to make sure you have the right one before ordering.

The first site is the Louisiana State Archives which can be found online at http://www.sos.louisiana.gov/tabid/53/Default.asp. Once on the site you will want to check under the Research Library tab to see what records are available. This site has indexes for passenger manifests, confederate pension applications and vital records. The vital records include deaths (1911-1956) with some areas such as Orleans Parish having some death notices back to 1804. Additionally, you can find Orleans Parish birth records (1819-1907) with some records back to 1790 and Orleans Parish marriage records (1870-1957) with some records back to 1831.

Some additional sites for vital records online include the New Orleans Daily Picayune Death Index which covers the years 1837-1857 and 1870. This index can be found at

http://nutrias.org/~nopl/info/louinfo/deaths/deaths.htm. The New Orleans Justice of the Peace Marriage Records for 1846-1880 can be found at

http://nutrias.org/~nopl/inv/jpmarrindex/jpmarrindex.htm. The New Orleans Daily Picayune Marriage Index for 1837-1857 can be found at

http://nutrias.org/~nopl/info/louinfo/newsmarr/newsmarr.htm.

As you can tell, the availability of online records outside New Orleans is pretty sparce at this time. If you have any sites that you have used to find Louisiana records online please pass them along.

Finding Records Online - Kentucky

I am back to my listing of web sites offering free access to records within a state. Today I will be discussing some of the databases available for Kentucky.

One of the databases available for northern Kentucky is hosted by the Kenton County Public Library. This site is located at http://apu.kenton.lib.ky.us/gen/gendb.php. Many of the records focus on Kenton County and the area around Covington, Kentucky and include cemetery, church, Civil War, census, birth and death records. If your families ever lived in this area of Kentucky this is a great resource.

A good source for death (1911-1992), marriage (1973-1993) and divorce (1973-1993) records is the Kentucky Vital Records Index located at http://ukcc.uky.edu/vitalrec/. Another death index database can be found on the Rootsweb website at  http://vitals.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ky/death/search.cgi. This database includes an index of almost 3 million names between 1911-2000. If you want to see the actual death certificates you can find them at http://kyvitals.com/.  

The Kentucky Land Office has a variety of land grant databases on their web page at http://sos.ky.gov/land/search/. This site includes some really great databases including digital copies of the Revolutionary War Warrants prior to 1792, West of Tennesee River Military Patents, Virginia and Kentucky Patents, and several others. These land grant databases include copies of the grants, surveys and other documents supporting land claims.

The Kentucky Cemetery Catalog can be found at http://205.204.134.47/cemetery.asp. This database includes hundreds of thousands of names from cemeteries across Kentucky. All of the information was gathered by volunteers.

The Kentuckiana Digital Library has links to several collections at http://kdl.kyvl.org/.  These collections include newspapers, books, images, maps, oral histories, manuscripts and journals. The newspaper archives is a little cumbersome to navigate but once you get through the links you can see the actual pages of the paper with your search term highlighted.

Well, I hope these databases help in your search for relatives from Kentucky.

Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt #1

The Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt #1 at Facebook has suggested the following blog "Upload your favorite picture and talk about it on your blog. Answer the who/what/when/where/why of the subject matter and explain why it is your favorite."

As with all records, it is always a good idea to ocassionally look back at your photo collection to see if there are any new clues that we might have missed in the past.

These are pictures of my wife's 2nd great grand aunt, Fannie Harris. Fannie had two sisters, Willie Mae and Grace Harris. Both of her sisters died about 1909. These pictures were probably taken sometime around the turn of the century. The first picture shows Fannie riding an alligator. If you haven't guessed yet, the picture was taken in Florida (see the cabbage palms in the background). This picture is typical of the pictures we have of Fannie. Most of them show her with alligators. I am not really sure why she has the alligators in her pictures but it does exemplify 

her strong will and independence. This woman was married twice, one of her husbands was a limo driver and she ran a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida. The hotel was called Hotel Adams and it still stands but today it is more of a flop house located adjacent to the Greyhound bus station. We have had a real difficult time finding records for this family. We believe that her father came to Florida to fight during the Seminole Wars and they settled in a small town called Yalaha in central Florida. The town was named by her brother-in-law's father. Yalaha sits on Lake Harris which was named for her grandfather who surveyed the lake. We have not found any census records with the family listed. The only records we have found so far are city directories from the late 1880's. The difficulty of finding records for this family make the pictures that we do have all the more precious.

Happy New Years!

1-1-2009 - It seems like just a few weeks ago we were celebrating the beginning of 2008. As we get older the years seem to get shorter and we never seem to be able to keep all of our resolutions we make each year. So, knowing this, what have I resolved to do?

This year I resolve to do better on FamilySearch Indexing. I have been slacking on this in the past and have only completed 3350 records since it first started. I read the news about Alta Mesa Stake in Mesa, Arizona completing over 4 million records last year. That is a huge accomplishment. We need to make sure everyone we know is doing something to help the cause of indexing. It doesn't take much time to complete one set of records each week. If we all did just one set of records (approximately 25-50 names) each week, each one of us would complete 1300-2600 records each year.  Those of us who have more time can easily double this number.

This year I resolve to do better keeping my journal. Journals are an important record of our times and will help our descendents understand what our lives were like. Just think how useful it would be to you to have a copy of a journal written by your great grandparents. I do try to keep up with mine but it is hit and miss. Sometimes I go for a week writing every day. Other times it is 3 or 4 weeks between entries. I have only been keeping my journal since July 9, 2006 and it is currently only 72 typed pages.

This year I resolve to exercise regularly. While doing my family medical history (see my blog for December 22, 2008 for ideas) I discovered that the cause of death of many of my ancestors is listed as of cerebral hemorrhages, diabetes, heart disease and various cancers. Many of these diseases can be prevented by being more physically fit. We bought a treadmill for Christmas and I have been using it several times each week. I have already noticed that my belts fit a notch or two smaller.

Sometimes the worst thing to do is be over ambitious in your resolutions. I took a look at my suggested resolutions for last year. The following are what I put in my January 2008 Family History Newsletter as examples of what we can do in the new year - http://milesmeyer.googlepages.com/January12008.pdf

1) To organize and label all your photographs.

• For the techies—scan all of your photographs, label them and create backup copies stored in a safe location.

2) Rededicate yourself to writing in your journal.

• Techies, why don’t you use that new video camera that you got for Christmas to begin creating a video journal.

3) To keep up with the new genealogy resources and attend a genealogy class. It is not enough now to just know all of the research techniques to find records in the court house. The internet is bringing us new ways to research on a daily basis. Learn how to effectively use these new websites.

4) Find sources for everyone in at least one direct line of ancestors.

5) Dedicate a few hours per week or a whole day each month to work on my family research.

6) Keep track of correspondence.

• Techies, make sure you have replied to all of the e-mails and file them away in folders for future reference.

7) Get organized. Look through that pile of papers and see what you may have forgotten about.

8) Genealogy is more than names and dates. Find out about the lives of your ancestors.

9) Put your research to good use. Share it with others.

10) Volunteer to help others. Make your time in the Family History Center a productive time. Help others by joining with sites such as Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness (http://www.raogk.org/)

I hope everyone had a good 2008 and wish everyone a great 2009! Only 364 more days until 2010.