Updates… LOTS of Them!!!

Forewarned: Long Post Ahead...

 

In continuing with updating my blog theme, I spent some time today looking at other improvements.  I’ve changed all of my labels to cluster them together into categories by hyphenating them.  I wish there was a way that Blogger would create a hierarchy for them.  Then a reader could go to Surnames and then see all of the names under that.  Instead, I changed them, one-at-a-time no less, to Surname – Name.  I also thought this would help designate these names as such.  For example, my Royal surname could be mistaken for Royal as in imperial or sovereign.  I also did that for Places and eliminated counties and towns, keeping just the state.

Also, because the new theme is wider in the posts section, I went back and enlarged many of the pictures and fonts.  That way, viewers may not have to click on them to see them large enough.

Then I started to go through old posts and see if there were any “dangling” items I said I would bring up in a later post and never addressed.  Or updates to posts.  Here goes…

1. In 2010 Has Arrived! I mention that I’d like to start a hand-written diary.  Didn’t happen.  Other priorities.  My around-the-house improvements are in full swing!  I am pulling things out of storage, clearing out, cleaning up and de-cluttering continuously and with fervor!  {It helps that hubby and I became empty-nester’s in July… and no one has moved back home yet:-)  I’m plugging away at that cross-stitch and, after attending a Sampler’s Guild meeting by happenstance (you know I believe there are no accidents) I picked up some tips, a better frame, and magnification clip-on glasses, which all help immensely.  I go on to say that writing down my goals for that post helped to put it all in perspective.  My latest ProGen assignment was to write an education plan, in which I included some other goals and unfinished items “to-do list” style.  Once again, I emphasize how that helped me keep my goals on the forefront of my mind and keep them there until they’re addressed.  MAKE A LIST OF YOUR GOALS!!!  In: life in general, related to your research, or anything else!  It really does help.
2. In My Genealogical Superpower I talked about how I like to help others and teach.  Since then, I have signed up to be a contributor at Find-A-Grave, done look-ups for two people at the GA Archives for friends across the country on GenealogyWise and agreed to repeat my “Internet Tools for Genealogy” at my county society’s upcoming Beginner’s Course 2011 in addition to another one about logging your research and citing sources (details have not been discussed further).
3. In the Land Records for Female Ancestor? post I talked about how I’m cleaning up records in my Ancestry.com family tree to show actual records instead of text.  I am STILL doing this as I work on any family line.  What a pain!  Can’t we get the Software people to work with Ancestry so that GedCom files can be synchronized instead of merely uploaded or downloaded?  (I think Family Tree Maker does this, but I don’t use that one). Also, I’ve learned a whole lot more about researching land records since then and it makes me smile at my naiveté’ back then! ;-) 
4. I have not worked on my pockets mentioned in Threads of Time.  I put that away to focus on my unfinished cross-stitch project mentioned above.  However, I did make a unembroidered pair of pockets for their practical use out of plain linen and an 18th century women’s wool cloak with the hood lined in silk.  I finished a new polonaise style dress and coordinating petticoat.
5. More of Tee's Crewel: I have continued to work on cleaning out my storage room and found yet another of Tee’s pieces of crewel work!  But you’ll have to wait to see that in another post!  I still need to hang it and take a photo.
6. Keeping up with my goals, see Progress for Goals in 2010, I am still archiving photos and VHS tapes at home – a long-term project.  I’ve pulled another of my grandfather’s trophy’s from a yacht race and polished it (silver), I’ve printed a couple of retouched photos to frame, and decided I don’t like all the clocks together on one wall and plan to move them around the house into places where I’d like them better and separate from each other.
7. Organizing Photos: Manage Folders on Your Computer: I finished making a new folder structure.  However, I have many subfolders in my Dump_From_Camera folder that need to be named, tagged, edited and moved.  Will it ever end?
8. From FGS Conference 2010: Recovering Back Home: I still have not gone through my FGS materials.  They are on my desk in one of  my To-Do project pockets.  Oh, and those same friends that “hate me for winning all the time” were at our genealogy meeting the other night when our speaker announced that she had 2 door prizes.  Her lecture was on the Georgia Land Lotteries.  She asked us to identify the date of a particular year’s land lottery when they started issuing grants (referring to her handout). I was the first to see the dates from July 22 to August something. Then the speaker clarified asking “what was the starting date?”  “July 22nd”, someone else answered.  We all thought the person with the answer would be the winner when she said,  “Who has a birthday around July 22nd”?  My hand went up… “July 28th”.  Followed by someone else.  Speaker asks “is is less than 6 days from the date”?  “Nope”.  I felt daggers in my back from my friends eyes and glanced over my shoulder to see them looking at me with “that look” and big smirks on their faces!  They told me later that they “were going to make me buy the chicken wings at dinner because of this”!  Geez, I can’t help when I was born!!!… and, oh, by the way, we all thought it was the first to answer who got the prize, not a birthday thing!  Maybe I just should keep my mouth shut!  HAHA!  But I won a CD entitled “Georgia Colonial and Headright Plat Index, 1735-1866” by Mary H. Abbe published by the R.J. Taylor, Jr. Foundation and Georgia Archives in 2005.  I can use this for my McVicker/Royal/Brown ancestors of Henry and Dooly Counties, Georgia!  How exciting!!! 

(They love to tease me, but they still love me too).

Copyright © 2010 Joanne Schleier
Photo credit: called REBOOT! by  http://www.flickr.com/photos/mark-magnusson/.

Insomnia Does an Archivist Good!

OK so first, I do not recommend this to all of you genealogists working on your archiving projects (little disclaimer there), but I can’t tell you how happy I am that I was able to plow through a ton of negatives last night this morning!  

{Doing happy dance… oh yeah}!

Every once in a while I get these bouts of insomnia.  For me, that means that I can’t sleep and don’t feel tired until sometime way after midnight.  Going to bed would just mean tossing and turning, so I stay up and do something relaxing until I feel sleepy (while my husband is catching up on some major zzz’s and REM sleep including the occasional snore… {jealous}).  I don’t think that this happens often enough to interfere with my daily life and I don’t like allopathic doctors or medications.  So, I just deal with it take advantage of it when it happens.  My mom and grandmother were night owls too.  We get our creative bursts of energy after the sun goes down.  “No I’m not a witch, I am you.”  (Sorry, I just had to).

Well, last night I went to bed at 3:30am!  I tossed and turned until 4:00am which was the last time I looked at the clock.  WHAT!?!?  WOW, that was HIGHLY unusual.  The thought occurred to me that I might not sleep at all!  Which would be fine with me until it catches up with me later!

Fortunately, I have several projects in the works and the one I chose to work on allowed me to sit on the couch with the TV on.  I had already compiled all of my negatives, sorting them by type, 35mm, 110 and disc camera films.  My focus was on the 110 size negatives stashed in an old can opener box.  (For Shame!)  WELL!!!  At least I saved them all!  The biggest mistake I made was separating them from the prints in the first place and not noting the date, subject, location or anything! ~I can’t tell you how much I’m learning!

I set up my little area, brought in the films and supplies and got to work.  I went through each image on each film and found the corresponding print which wasn’t to hard ‘cuz I already” sorted” in the previous phase of the project.  On the back of the each print in the corner I wrote (using my archival safe pen) “110” for the type of negative and then “N#”, “N” for “negative” and the number on the strip that correlates to the image. 

To see the itty-bitty image, I used both my floor lamp and desktop Ott-Lites.  I wore some reading glasses (I don’t wear  prescription glasses) and added some clip on Magna-Clips magnifiers in a +3.00 for when I couldn’t see anything without them.  I love these things for my hand sewing because they flip up and down.  Figured they’d work for this too – BOY HOWDY – they sure helped a lot! 

Some of the prints were collected already by subject in folders and I made a spreadsheet to help me locate each set.  I better save how I set that up for another post.  Just know that this is NOT  the initial stage of my project, or the last.  Still other prints were in an album – not chronological, but all mixed together (what was I thinking?).  And best of all (just because I like sarcasm) they were in one of those albums with the sticky glue behind the images – I think they call it a magnetic album.  YIKES!  I only have one of that kind of album and now it’s half empty {grin}.  Mostly “Germany” and “Spain” are out of it.  

I put each set of negatives in it’s own archival sheet protector, temporarily, with the prints I could find and a note with how many prints on the strip, the size of the prints (this helps to find missing ones because I can look at the size of the  prints) and subject or anything that might suggest a possible match for one missing like “Kera (my daughter) wearing yellow sunglasses”.  

I put all the sheet protectors in a 3” binder, temporarily again, and labeled the binder “WIP Germany” for “Work in Progress”.  That sets it apart from sets where all the prints are found and ready to put into archival page protectors for the particular print size.  Which is the next phase…

For now, all the 110 negatives are accounted for!  Thanks to a sleepless night (I think?)!!!  Now the negatives for the disc film is going to be worse because they’re even smaller!  Fortunately, their aren’t a whole lot of those – because those cameras were crap, cheap, worthless poor quality.  But good, I guess, if you’re in the sandy desert fighting in a war…

I hope I’ve given you some help if you’re struggling with what to do with all of your images and negatives.  I’m no expert, but I have learned a lot and want to do the best I can to have it all make sense to the poor soul lucky person who inherits all my neatly organized, indexed and labeled photos!   

NOW GO TO BED!  {Just kidding}.

*I have no affiliation and I am not being compensated for or by any of the products or companies I’ve linked to.  I just wanted to answer the questions before they were asked.

Painting Goes Back to Artists Family

Exhilaration!!! That's an understatement of what I'm feeling right now! 

One of the long-term projects that I'm working on right now is to deal with all the the antiques my mother had in her home when she died in 1991 and her mother's belongings from when she died in 1994. I know many of you archivists will squirm a when I say they have been stored in cardboard boxes in my basement ever since. EEK!

 

I have already dealt with the furniture and most things which are sentimental to me or to my brother. What remains are the things I don't know what to do with which they had in their homes.

One of the items is a small painting, oil on canvas. The canvas is about 5 x 7 and it's in a gilded frame.

I don't know whether this was my mothers or grandmothers, though it looks more like my grandmother's style. I don’t know where it came from, though we were probably living in New England at the time they acquired it. I personally think it's charming, but between their stuff and mine, I really need to purge as much as I can! If it's of value I sell it. If it's not I donate it.

But this one was special because of this (click on it to see it larger):

The artist's signature included her maiden name and married name. Viola Files Dube’. So I did a search on Ancestry.com and only found one tree with her complete name. I contacted the owner who said the artist is his great grandfather's brother's wife. And that his mother would be thrilled to have it because "Uncle Herman" was her favorite uncle. 

So, it's boxed and ready to ship. THISisFUN!!! And I will be smiling all the way to the post office knowing that it was returned to the original family.

Progress: Archiving Photos and VHS Tapes

Well, I am still progressing, ever so slowly, with my archiving project. I am rather proud of myself because I am very much a "starter". I have loads of enthusiasm and motivation when I begin a project and generally find that I don't like to finish up what I've started because the "newness" of it has worn off! To date I have endured watching a total of 17 tapes! Mind you that some of these are probably 8 hour tapes! Here's the breakdown:

5 - Christopher Lowell
2 - Room by Room
2 - History Channel
4 - HGTV
1 - Football
1 - Blank tape
1 - Cheerleading competitions
1 - Sci-Fi Channel

So far, I haven't found any of the home movies or televised video of my family to actually capture from the tapes. In other words, I am not recording all of these shows to DVD. I'm only playing all of them to search for those key pieces I wish to record. Also, I learned of a neighbor's elderly mother who still records her TV shows on VHS and I was happy to donate my old ones after I viewed them! LOVE THAT! ReCyClInG at it's best!

My stepdaughter's mother also gave her a box of VHS home movies and I started converting those to DVD for her. So far, I've converted four.

Not bad, I'd say, as my pile is getting noticeably smaller! The downside to this, which turned out to be a good thing in the end, is that I find myself anchored to my desktop computer. I did manage to get quite a few tasks caught up at the beginning and then ran out of things to do. So, also part of my archiving project (which is why it turned out to be good), I started scanning photos to digital. I have a bookshelf of many photo albums which I attempted to archive many years ago.  These are those chunky mini albums about 4" x 6" in size but thick.

After educating myself on the "proper" way to do this since then, I realized my first attempt was ALL WRONG! The books themselves were not archival quality. Although they are labeled, there is no index to speak of for quick retrieval. And I really would like a uniform look to all my photo books so they don't appear to have been bought at different periods of time.

The solution? Start scanning photos to digital! After learning I could "gang scan" photos, which I'll cover in another post, I started whizzing through the pictures. I already have one and a half albums completed! I also purchased archival page protectors and books from Light Impressions.

I'll try to write more about my process and hopefully that will inspire you to get started archiving your own photos and videos. Also if you have any questions I might be able to answer, just leave me a comment.

Copyright © 2010 Joanne Schleier

Converting VHS Tapes to DVD

Do you have shelves or boxes full of VHS Tapes? Are they labeled or indexed so that you even know what's recorded on them?

Here's my stash of VHS tapes in my closet...


Yes, they have been there for YEARS...and I don't know what's on them. This is Phase II of the project because I already separated the Purchased Tapes from the Recorded Tapes. This stash is only the tapes I recorded. I do know that there are some tapes within the stash that have some precious recordings on them that I will want to preserve by converting them to another type of media.

This has been one of those PROJECTS that is going to take a lot of preparation and a lot of time to complete. I call anything that requires more than one action or task a "project". This has been on my list of things-to-do for a very long time.

So, it was time to tackle this - as VHS tapes are prone to deteriorate over time. I did keep them in a controlled environment away from direct sunlight, temperature controlled and with low humidity, i.e. my office closet.

I pulled our old VCR from the living room, the only one left in the house, into my office and researched how to connect the cables from it to my computer. Now, I already have a program installed on the computer which will copy and burn to DVD. You will also need some kind of conversion device as VHS is ANALOG and it needs to be converted to DIGITAL.

That was all finished and the first test run was done. The result? The old VCR ate my tape! I tried another and it didn't play either - therefore, it wasn't the tape, but the machine.

So, it went in the garbage and I found myself purchasing a new VCR! I know, at this day and age they are almost obsolete and I am buying a new one! But it's needed. I bought one from Wal-Mart with a VCR and DVD player combination. They had a machine that plays a tape and burns to disc all-in-one. But I saved the money knowing that I already have the software needed to do it on my computer. You could pay the extra few bucks and save yourself the trouble of the computer software and conversion device.

So, here is the new VCR in my office attached to my computer. I also pulled out the old "rewinder" machine. It is exclusively used to rewind your tapes and save the wear and tear on the VCR.

Now, when I am sitting at my desk, I play a tape with the volume up loud enough to hear the content but not distract from my task at hand. I am playing an old HGTV episode of "Room by Room" as I write this.

I know that I mostly have HGTV and DIY recorded as well as some History Channel programs. But, I am mostly interested in finding an old image of my grandmother. She was a model in New York and always told me about how she was a "Chesterfield Girl" on a billboard. She described being a platinum blond with big white teeth holding her cigarette in a red convertible with a red scarf blowing in the wind. She was 5'9" and beautiful.

I never saw the image. Or any of her other modeling images because they were destroyed in a flood in the basement. That only added to my desire to see one. I also found in the 1930 census that she was 21 and a "saleswoman for ladies wear". Then one day, I was watching TV (and can you imagine that I happened to be recording?) when her image flashed up on the screen! I was beside myself in shock! It was one of those spiraling images that flashed up large and then disappeared for another to follow just behind it. I couldn't believe my eyes! I played it over and over, paused it and watched it in slow motion! It was her! Exactly as she had described it. Sadly, I couldn't tell her about finally seeing it as she had passed away.

I also have some TV commercial I was in and other TV shows. Nothing big - no voice, just an extra in most of them. I'll be sure to post some images once I find them.

It has been a week and I have gone through four tapes. I only recorded one segment off of "The Christopher Lowell Show" of a beautiful room redo that I had not forgotten about. The rest went into the trash. BOY DOES THAT FEEL GOOD! Finally started the project and finally cleaning out the closet to capture the memories I want to keep and discard the junk!

If you have VHS tapes that you wish to preserve, I highly suggest that you convert them now to a newer media. Don't procrastinate, get started now.

Copyright © 2010 Joanne Schleier

What A Surprise!

I found a vintage photo behind another one inside a frame!

One of my ongoing projects is to take all of my original photos, digitize them, print copies, and create a photo collage on the wall.

I definitely want to preserve the originals for posterity, so those won't be hanging on the wall, but instead will be preserved in archival materials.

But the question arose as to what to do with a photo inside an original frame. Do I scan the photo within the frame and print that? Or do I remove the photo from the frame scan just the picture and then print it?

When in doubt, ask someone else who knows. So I did. I asked Denise over at The Family Curator blog. She was quick to reply with her lengthy and detailed advice. I followed what she said exactly.

The photo is of my mother when she was a little girl. I don't know exactly how old she was and can only assume it was taken somewhere in New York where she was raised. At some point in time, before she passed away, she did tell me that the frame was handmade by a first grader named Gerard Snowver. He had a terrible crush on her and gave it to her as a gift. We named our rabbit after him (Gerard lived at least eight years, the rabbit, that is).

First, I was to scan the photo in the frame. Here's the result:
Next, remove the photo from the frame and scan that. Here's the result:Surprisingly, on the backside of the photo in my grandmother's penmanship is this:And so my mother was five years old at the time the photo was taken and they were living at 30 5th Ave., New York City to be precise! At this point, it is premature to do the "genealogy happy dance" because underneath this photo, I found another photo of my mother:This one was folded to fit inside the frame. Nothing was written on the back. I do remember seeing this as a child and, therefore, I know it was my mother.

I've decided to make a print of the photograph within the frame, put it into another frame under glass to hang on the wall. The carving on the original wooden frame has so much character and interest that I would hate to leave it out.

Thank you so much Denise!

So, NOW I can do a genealogy happy dance!!!