Digitizing Your Family History

by Rhonda R. McClure

Book Overview

Preserve Your Family's Precious Heirlooms Your interest may be in the past, but permanently preserving your family's history relies on today's technology. If you have limited knowledge of computer... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558707085
• ISBN13: 9781558707085
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Family Tree Books
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.5" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Great reference for "Digital Family Historians"

(Our online family history service - Family Photoloom - focuses on helping family historians make the photo~genealogy connection, and we present information about digitizing family history to a variety of audiences. This well-written guide is the primary resource for our genealogy conference presentation entitled "No More Fuzzy Faces: The Secrets of Digitizing Family History.") In her introductory acknowledgment, author Rhonda McClure invites the reader to "Remember to grasp technology." It resonates well. Computers have revolutionized genealogy research, and in this excellent guide, McClure extends the boundaries of this revolution to encompass the larger circle of family history. "Digitizing Your Family History" offers an easy, interesting read; McClure weaves relatable personal narrative and relevant technical information, and the reader receives an education and appreciation for the way things used to be (and how far things have come) while getting up to speed on the latest technology. Beginning with a chapter focusing on the new horizons that digitizing offers to the family historian, this practical how-to reference provides a good introduction to image editing, working with vintage photos, and digitizing audio and video tapes. Chapters are logically sequenced, and well thought out icons in the margins call attention to tips, techniques, and online resources. Scanning photos, paper documents, slides, and negatives are covered in great detail. One whole chapter, for example, is dedicated to helping the reader choose the scanner or digital camera that is optimal for his needs. Another chapter focuses on the "Imaging Road Warrior," and provides all the essential information needed for digitally preserving history on the road. A highly-experienced genealogy researcher, McClure takes pains to emphasize the importance of keeping research journals, and offers practical advice for doing this with the tools at hand. She also addresses the challenges of organizing, printing, and sharing digital family history, and provides insightful tips and advice for meeting those challenges. All in all, "Digitizing Your Family History" is an excellent choice, particularly for beginning and intermediate "Digital Family Historians."

The Way of the Future

Take heed and get started now. Once you have all those pictures scanned into the computer, organized and put on CD's - you can share them with everyone. Take the time to sort through your photos, label them before you die and turn them into your history. The legacy that you leave to future generations. A digitized photo is worth a million words.

Excellent guide to a relatively newsubject

When my father died a few years ago, my mother began systematically sorting through eight decades of accumulated stuff and giving the next generation "first dibs" on anything they wanted before the remainder was discarded. Of course, I took anything relating to the family's history, including old correspondence, military and employment files, and about forty pounds of old photo albums and several shoeboxes of loose snapshots. I'm slowly, steadily working my way through them, scanning not only photographs but also documents and old letters into a digitized format, cleaning up some of the older items with Photoshop, writing up brief text files (to be attached to the image files) explaining those people, places, and circumstances I could identify (and also transcribing my mother's penciled notes from the backs of many of the photos), and collecting everything in some sort of order on CDs for later distribution to the rest of the family. (Christmas is always coming.) Now, I'm reasonably computer-savvy and I have professional training in archival conservation, so all this seemed pretty obvious to me, but that probably would not be the case for many non-techies. Rhonda McClure to the rescue, as she has often done before! She begins by explaining at length the opportunities digitization offers for preserving (which is increasingly simple with a home computer) and disseminating documents and photos (via CDs and the Web). Then she discusses the relevant technology, including what to look for in an inexpensive flat-bed scanner (under $100 these days) and a digital camera (under $200 now for a good one). The "Imaging Road Warrior" chapter is excellent; she recommends keeping a journal of research and sites visited in your word processor. (I never travel without my laptop, digital camera, and a small combination scanner-printer.) She also does a good job explaining the "why" of image-editing and enhancing vintage photographs without drifting too far into the "how" (which would take another book, and would be too software-specific anyway), and suggests isolating faces of individuals in group shots for attachment to database entries in your chosen genealogy software. (I confess that had never occurred to me.) Digitizing and preserving audio- and videotapes is something I know very little about, but she seems to cover all the bases there, too. Then comes sharing and publishing (in the broadest sense) what you've digitized - which is half the point of doing all this in the first place. Even knowing that the pace of change in technology will cause sizable parts of this well-written volume to become outdated in a couple of years, I strongly recommend it.