Genealogy photos
My grandmother had lots of albums full of photos of family and friends. She was a photographer herself way before that was common, and the obvious source of my talent in that area...
Because I've had the privilige of looking at all those albums since childhood, the value of them was ingrained in me. But when she died, we had to divide them up between the family members. Some of my favorite photos were suddenly not that accessible.
Years ago I copied some of the photos with my SLR and a macro lens. But those copies are not as good as the copies I can make today with my scanner. Here's how:
Scan them at maximum sharpness (often the first glossy photo option in the software) at 600 dpi. Scan them straight to file in the TIFF format.
That's a trick I learned from a professional (the excessive dpi and the non-destructive format), and one you should definitely consider.
Once you've got that material (burn them on to CD in the original state first) on your computer, you're ready to do the real time consuming work.
Many of the studio photographs from older times are nicked and damaged. Some pretty badly. Learn some retouching techniques to go with your favorite graphics software. Some of the amateur snaps are so badly faded they seem unusable. But they can be salvaged if you know what you're doing. I won't go into this here. Buy a book or search online. The better tools you have, the more you can do. Just one word of caution: Although scanning photos is a lot easier than copying them any other way, and it seems like easy work, it's actually quite exhausting. A lot more than you'd think.
That said, I sometimes wait until I get a better copy to scan. I scan the first one (that's really badly scarred) and identify it. Then a few months later I may come across a better specimen and use that one for the final results instead. Also, remember to use a soft brush to brush away small particles, and keep the scanning surface clean!
So, what's the point of all this?
When you're done (outputting the photos to JPEG at 300 dpi final result and quite a bit compressed), you can either upload the photos to an online printing service or take it to a local lab that makes real photos from digital files. Those copies will last as long as modern photos, which is a lot longer than computer printouts done with any technology I know of!
The net result is that all your relatives can have a modern style photo album with photos of all the ancestors you've been collectively able to find!
When I started doing this, I came across quite a lot more than the photo albums my grandmother had. Cousins and second cousins were happy to contribute their albums, as well as non-related people - in case there were any from my family there!
But I was also shocked to find that some cousins and second cousins have burned photos they couldn't identify! That's so shocking I can't find words! In this day and age, it would be common courtesy at least to put them up on a website and ask if somebody else knew them - instead of burning them! One day another member of your family or the descendant of a neighbor will have a problem forgiving you if you burn photos!
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This page was created by Ann Elisabeth Nordbo and has its home at
http://www.annelisabeth.com/
Updated 2004-12-26
Premier issue October 10th 1996