I
am currently digitizing all of our family albums. There are 60 of them spanning
the years 1969 to 2015. There will be one more as soon as I get the last batch
of photos mounted into number 61. I have finished scanning 37 of them which
contain over 1,750 images comprising 3.3 GB of space.
So
why would I want to do that?
Well,
these albums contain all of the memories of our family captured in pictures,
from when my wife and I met to the last trip to China to see our granddaughter’s
lead performance in the Alice and Wonderland ballet. The main problem is that
our family have all grown and moved away and are busy raising their own
families. So the albums have sat on the bookshelf with no one to leaf through
them. Yes sometimes the kids take a few down when they visit – to show their
own children what growing up looked like. But since the visits are not very
frequent the many years of memories do not get visited often.
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Our Family
Albums – now numbering 60, plus a few miscellaneous, specialty albums,
containing pictures of our family from the time we were married.
I
wrote about our albums and other material in a blog What will we do
with future photos?
last April. At the time I commented on what would people do with the thousands
of pictures taken now with digital cameras.
The
other reason for digitizing all the albums now is that I keep wondering what
will happen to all these books when we are gone. I mentioned that in my
previous post as well. That’s a great worry for all family historians – the
preservation of files with family information gong back hundreds of years and
memorabilia including everything from grandparents’ correspondence to cream
cans used to haul milk from the farm way back when. It is all important to me
but will it be to my descendants.
At
least with digitizing the albums I can hope that our family memories will be
preserved somewhere in virtual space where our children and grandchildren, and
hopefully their children and grandchildren, might one day have a look-see.
The
first 32 albums were the coil-bound type, usually with around 40 pages. Because
I could not take the pages out and scan them separately, I had to hold the
books down on the flatbed scanner and make an image much larger than the actual
page size. Then I went through and straightened and cropped them. The last
group are three-ring binder style which makes it easy to lift out and directly
scan each page at 8 ½” x 11” size. Some of the binders have over 100 pages. It
takes about an hour to do complete the digitizing of one album.
All
the albums have the magnetic self-adhesive pages with the clear, fold-over leaves,
although many of them are not very sticky anymore and the clear covers tend to
come loose. That means some photos dropped out as I went through the books and
had to be stuck back down with a glue stick. No matter! The end result is what
matters.
I
left the clear page covers down when scanning the pages. They did not generally
interfere with getting a good scanned image. Certainly they are good enough to
see who and what is in the photos. I also scanned at 300 dpi so the images are
large and detailed enough to withstand enlarging on a monitor.
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Screen shot of
folder on my hard drive with album page images
One
great thing about this exercise is that I have been able to relive the memories
myself looking at every page as I went through the scanning process. It is neat
to revisit the day your daughter arrived in the world, or your first
grandchild, see the early school pictures and extended family get-togethers at
Christmas. There are also wedding and birth announcements, some of which I have
copied to my family history files. And copies of Christmas letters received
over the years. In short, there is much more to our family album library that
just pictures.
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Some of the
memories recorded in photos from albums now digitized
As
I indicated in my April 2016 post, I am redoing all the old family albums of my
parents. I am now working on volume five which will be the last one. They are
large, leather-bound books. I have many of the really old photos scanned but
will probably digitize all of the albums once I have finished the last one.
I
will be putting the completed digital album library online so that all of our
family members can access it – anytime and anywhere. The hunt is on now to find
just the right venue to hold it all and still be secure. All the albums will go
into plastic storage boxes now rather than back on bookcase shelves. I don’t
have the room anymore for the bookcases. They will still be available if someone wants to dig out an album or two and they will be handy for whoever
wants them later.
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Albums now
stored in plastic bins
Wayne
Shepheard is a retired geologist and active genealogist. He volunteers with the
Online Parish
Clerk
program in England, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of
articles about various aspects of genealogy in several family history society
journals. Wayne has also served as an editor of two such publications. He
provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated.
