It's time for this week's Ancestry Quick Tip Jamboree! Thanks to everyone who has sent in a Quick Tip. Please keep them coming so that we can keep this tradition going. You can send your tips to ADNeditor@ancestry.com.

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Have a great day!
Juliana

Digital Photos of Tombstones, Registers, and Newspapers

Several years ago I bought two bound volumes of 1918 Altoona Tribune newspapers on eBay. Excitement quickly turned to dismay as I found the pages were so brittle they crumbled when I handled them, and the supersize cardboard easel I built to hold them upright at my desk (a) was too big for the desk and (b) destroyed the bottom of the newspaper pages. The biggest problem was the musty smell of the newspaper--after a certain length of exposure to it, it made me wheeze.

I bought a Kodak EasyShare DX6490 in April of this year to use on a tombstone-photographing trip to my hometown, Altoona, Pennsylvania. I chose it because of its 4 megapixel image resolution, 10x optical zoom lens, and large 2.2" LCD screen--not to mention an excellent discount at Sam's Club.

Four of us "gravers" shot several thousand Oakridge Cemetery tombstone photos on a couple of rainy April days, and most of them have now been uploaded and incorporated in Blair County's USGenWeb Archives' tombstone project.

(A hint for tombstone photographers: Never resize and make smaller your tombstone images until after you've transcribed the inscriptions.)

While we were at the cemetery, the custodian showed us the cemetery's first burial register, a perishing collection of handwritten pages and page fragments held together inside an old canvas-covered ledger cover. One of the other photographers had experience photographing the pages of antique books. I held the ledger, and she photographed every page of it, using the tailgate of a pickup truck as our desk. The images were loaded onto a CD and donated to Blair County Genealogical Society.

When I got home, I decided to try using the camera to transcribe the 1918 newspapers. At first, I tried OCRing the results, but the pages are very dark, the ink is very faded, and the time spent editing the jpegs so they'd OCR just wasn't worth it.

Now I photograph several days of obits and marriage notices at a time, load the jpegs onto a folder on my computer, open them in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, manually adjust the size of the viewer window to fill the left half of my computer screen, open Word, manually adjust that window to fit the right half of the screen, and type in the transcription of the articles.

I chose to use Windows Picture and Fax Viewer because I can advance through the images one at a time without opening and closing jpeg files, and I can change the orientation of the image--there's a range of zoom available.

I bought a 1948 bound volume of the Altoona Mirror--also on eBay--and found that the pages are still in good enough shape so that I can photograph the articles, then use OmniPage Pro 14 to OCR them. How good is that?!

Judy Banja

USGenWeb Archives:
Bedford, Blair, Centre, Clearfield, Fulton, Luzerne, Mifflin, and Wyoming Counties, PA

Practice Makes Perfect
There have been a lot of questions lately about how to take pictures of documents and old photos with a digital camera. As with any electronic equipment, there will be a great deal of variety from camera to camera.

I'd like to suggest that people start by practicing on what they have--older photos, original documents in their possession, the family Bible record page, family heirlooms, newspaper clippings, important letters, awards, any nearby locations important to the family history, even copies of key documents, etc.

If you are feeling uncertain about how to do this, consider asking at the local community college, senior center, or high school for a referral to someone who has these skills. They may be able to guide you through the process for a fee.

Practice makes perfect. Taking the digital pictures, adding remarks, and burning copies of disks for relatives and co-researchers is a project that will give a researcher many of the skills they can use on a large research trip later. Those disks spread across the country are also an excellent piece of "insurance" against fire, flood, and natural disasters. They may jog someone's memory as an extra benefit!

Anne Davis
Seattle, WA