Digitizing Genealogy -- What is digitization?

Reproduction of a bison of the cave of Altamira

Genealogical jargon can sometimes be difficult. This is especially true when overlaid with legal, scientific, DNA, or technological jargon. In the technological side of genealogy, you will frequently hear the word "digital" in all its forms (digitalize, digitalization, etc. also you may see it spelled with an "s" rather than a "z" in Great Britain).  What is all this?

It gets a little bit involved to understand the concepts and what is actually going on when we talk about digitizing something. Stay with me and I will walk you through how all this came about. 

Since ancient times, humans have tried to capture and preserve their impressions of the physical world. The cave painting depicted above is an example of what could be called an "analog" image. What we mean by an "analog image" is that the method of reproduction of the physical reality is also a physical reality. At the time this image was painted on the wall of the cave, there really was a bison out there in the world running around and eating grass. The technical definition of an analog image would be something like this: relating to or using signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity such as spatial position or voltage. In the case of the cave painting, the "continuously variable physical quantity" is the paint used. 

When a genealogist looks at a document or other record of the past and copies out the information contained in the document, he or she is making an "analog" copy of the information using a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. Obviously, the cave painting above is not an exact replica of the original bison. Just as obviously, the pen or pencil copy of the information in a source document is also not an exact replica of the original. But for thousands of years, the only way to make a copy of a document at all was to copy it by hand. Printing was invented to speed up the process and enable the printer to make multiple copies of the same document. But each of those individual copies was still an "analog" of the original. Making any changes to the original analog copy essentially required remaking an original. If a painter painted a painting of a landscape, the only way I could acquire a copy of the painting was if someone copied the original in some format. 

In 1725, the limitation on making copies of an original began to change when Johann Heinrich Schulze made fleeting "photographs" of words by using stencils, sunlight, and a bottled solution of chalk and silver nitrate, simply as an interesting way to demonstrate that the mixture inside the bottle darkens where it is exposed to light. See Wikipedia, Timeline of photography technology.

If we fast forward through the history of the development of photography, we see that what was happening was that the inventors and developers of the photographic process were working on a new analog process of reproducing images. As photography developed, it became possible to use a camera to take a negative image (first negative invented in 1835 by Henry Fox Talbot) and then make as many positive image copies as desired of the "original" analog photograph. The media for the analog image was the glass plate or film. See Wikipedia, Timeline of photography technology.

Fast forwarding this whole process, for genealogists, the breakthrough for preserving documents came with the introduction of microfilm copies of the originals. The earliest microphotographs were made by John Benjamin Dancer in 1839, shortly after the introduction of the daguerreotype process. See Wikipedia: Microform. 

It is important to remember that all this fancy photographic stuff was still an analog of the physical reality as long as it involved some kind of physical film for capturing the image. What was important about film photography was the ability to make multiple copies rather cheaply and easily. Photography did for images what book printing did for books. 

So where do digital images come into all this? At the same time photography began to develop, the idea of manipulating information using mechanical and electronic devices also was beginning to emerge. A detailed history of computers is interesting, but beyond the scope of this post series. It is enough to say that the idea of a general-purpose computing device is usually attributed to Charles Babbage, who conceptualized the first mechanical computer beginning in 1833. See Wikipedia: Computer. It was necessary for a lot of other types of technology to develop before the first images could be transmitted electronically in 1920. Quoting from the Wikipedia article on Digital Imaging:

The first digital image was produced in 1920, by the Bartlane cable picture transmission system. British inventors, Harry G. Bartholomew and Maynard D. McFarlane, developed this method. The process consisted of “a series of negatives on zinc plates that were exposed for varying lengths of time, thus producing varying densities,”.[1] The Bartlane cable picture transmission system generated at both its transmitter and its receiver end a punched data card or tape that was recreated as an image.[2]

What happened here is that the "analog" representation of the physical reality had been transformed into a coded representation of the original in the form of electrical impulses. You could argue that this was still an "analog" image and that the medium of transmission had merely changed, but this development was significant to warrant a new category of "digital images." The word "digital" in this context focuses on the fact that the physical reality of the original is represented by a stream of electronic impulses. In the case of the original image transmission back in 1920, the punched data card or tape, was not recognizable as an image until it was processed by the receiver. 

The first digital photograph is attributed to Russell Kirsch in 1957. Here is a copy:

Pioneering digitally scanned image of Russell Kirsch's son Walden, 1957

The first digital camera is believed to be developed by Kodak in 1975. See "The World’s First Digital Camera by Kodak and Steve Sasson." Although the circuits and the devices have become smaller and smaller, the idea that an image can be made by discrete electronic sensors is at the heart of a digitalization. You could argue that the first movable type book was merely a small step from the original handwritten books, but this small step changed the world. Likewise, the first digital images began the same fundamental revolution in the way information was processed and transmitted. 

So, digitization is the process of taking a physical object (book, document, etc.) and using an electronic sensor, transforming the light rays from the object into a series of electronic impulses that can be transmitted, stored, manipulated and altered in an almost infinite number of ways. 

Please help save your old photographs

As genealogists we should be acutely aware of the importance of photographs in creating our family history and bringing it alive for present viewers. We have an important role in preserved our photographic heritage.

Most photographs are a unique artifact. This is especially true for older photos, before about 1920 or so.  and it may be true for modern photographic processes also, such as 35mm slides and other processes. Historically, it was rare that multiple copies were made from the same negative; either glass or acetate. Unless the negative has survived, the original photo may be the sole surviving print. If the negatives survive, technically it is possible to make a photographic print from the original negatives, but especially for the older glass negatives, this may be very expensive and/or difficult to do. It much more efficient to make a digitized copy of the negative and then "develop" the copy using a program such as Adobe Photoshop or a similar program.

It is interesting, but the quality and stability of the very old glass negatives is usually better than later acetate negatives. Perhaps a little history would be helpful here.

Photography went through several major phases beginning in the earliest times from about 1800. The claims to the earliest photographs all fall in the mid- to early 1800s with the "Boulevard du Temple", a daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, the photograph generally accepted as the earliest one of people. See Wikipedia: History of Photography. The photographs made by the process developed by Louis Daguerre became known as a Daguerrotypes. Although many of these early Daguerrotypes survive, they are usually considered priceless museum pieces. Each Daguerrotype or other similar process photograph was an original and could not be easily duplicated.

In the second stage of photography, (of course this is greatly compressed summary) process were developed to create a "negative" image from which multiple "positive" images could be made. One of the most successful of these processes involved using glass as the medium for the negative image. Without going into a discussion of how this worked, suffice it to say that the glass negatives that resulted were often of very high quality that matches the quality of prints made today by any other process.

In the final stage of photography, negatives were made of acetate or other similar substances and of course, as digital photography took over in the last ten years or so, film photography has become a rather specialized "historic preservation" hobby.

I am frequently approached by people with questions about how to preserve their personal collections of photographs. I always emphasize the importance of preserving as much as possible of their photographic heritage. As I have already stated, it cannot be replaced. Once a photograph is destroyed or the negative destroyed, it is gone forever. I will come back to this subject in the future, but right now I will give you a basic link to a site that can get you started with the preservation of your photographs no matter how new or old they are:

Please start with the Library of Congress Preservation Section. The Library of Congress is very active in both artifact (photographs) preservation and digital preservation (the preservation of digital images). 

Somewhat Random Thoughts on Photography and Genealogy - Truths and Lies

A number of the comments made in response to my sort-of recent post on the Ethics and Historicity of Photo "Restoration" started me thinking about photography and genealogy in general. There is a saying that the camera never lies. Some pundits have added the comment to read, photographs never lie until you edit them. As genealogists are we seeking Truth (with a capital T) or is genealogy an art where we express our subjective thoughts and impose them on history?

Is truth objective or subjective? Or both? What role do photographs have in understanding the truth of genealogy? Does it make a difference to my perception of historical truth if I can see photograph or a moving picture? If I know that my great-grandfather's name was Henry Martin Tanner, what does it add to see a picture?

This is Henry and his wife Eliza and three of his seventeen children. What do you know about Henry Tanner that you didn't know before looking at the picture? The picture, for all it is worth, is no substitute for the story, in words, of Henry's life. If you were doing genealogy and like the fairy tales, only had one wish, would you wish for a narrative biography or a photo? What if I had told you that the photo was of John Brown of Albuquerque, New Mexico? Would your perception of the photo change? What if I told you that the photo was of an unidentified family? What is the value of unidentified photos? What kind of effort would you make to identify a photo? Would it matter if you found the photo in your grandmother's diary as opposed to finding the photo in second-hand store? By the way, the photo really is Henry Martin Tanner and his wife Eliza Ellen Parkinson. But a photo will always be ancillary to sourced information about a family or individual.

Why am I asking these questions? Hmm. The answer is pretty simple. We are so saturated with images of every kind, we take images for granted. Right where I am sitting writing, I can see dozens, perhaps hundreds of images. But this was not always true. As you can see from the photo of Henry and Eliza and children, this photo was not a casual, spur of the moment thing. It took time, preparation and effort and as a result, the photographer captured something of the soul of the family. There truly is something so unique about the photo that the trite saying, mere words cannot express, is literally true.

Why, if I am a photographer, do I take pictures primarily of landscapes and buildings? Why don't I take pictures of people? (Before you get too worried, I really do take a lot of pictures of people, I just don't use them on the Internet. I am using the question in a rhetorical sense). If pictures are so important, what about all the people in your family who lived before the invention of photography?

OK, let's get serious. Photography is a art with a large measure of technology and science. I may worry a lot about whether or not a photograph is good or bad, but when it comes to photos of my now long dead ancestors, the quality of the photograph is more of a bonus than a requirement. No matter how poorly taken, if the photograph of my great-grandmother is the only one I have, I will treasure it. But to what extent is photography merely an adjunct to genealogy?

I think photography is valuable in itself as an art form and way to translate reality. It is really not much different that any other medium of expression, such as words or sculpture. But as genealogists and historians we view photos as something entirely different, they are not so much art but a confirmation of reality. No matter how much you have written about an individual or family, if you find a photograph, the person instantly becomes more tangible and the history comes alive.

Banning Photography

In a recent article in the Imaging Resource Newsletter,  the author, Steve Meltzer, asks the quiestion, "Does flash photography really damage art? The persistence of a myth." This article caught my eye because of a planned outing to a local display garden where the "Photography Policy" imposes a $100 fee for taking pictures in the garden. A similar policy exists at another botanical garden we frequently visit. I am aware of many museums and art galleries where photography is subject to an outright ban.

I cannot, for the life of me, imagine what kind of interest these gardens claim in their plants and flowers? It is obvious that banning photography is nothing more or less than an attempt to increase revenue. I can imagine some circumstances that might warrant outright bans on photography, but outdoor gardens, open to the public, do not fall into that category.

This same issue regularly confronts genealogists. Take for example the New York Public Library. Here is an excerpt from their Terms and Conditions:

Proprietary Rights
As between you and NYPL, NYPL owns, solely and exclusively, all rights, title and interest in and to the NYPL Websites, all the content (including, for example, audio, photographs, illustrations, graphics, other visuals, video, copy, software, etc.), code, data and materials thereon, the look and feel, design and organization of the NYPL Websites, and the compilation of the content, code, data and materials on such websites, including but not limited to any copyrights, trademark rights, patent rights, database rights, moral rights, sui generis rights and other intellectual property and proprietary rights therein.  Your use of the NYPL Websites does not grant to you ownership of any content, code, data or materials you may access on these websites.

Does this really mean that the New York Public Library claims to own all right, title and interest to all of the books, photographs and other materials in their collection? How did the library obtain such a vast interest in the world's intellectual property? My best guess is that the attorney who wrote this ridiculous statement, never used a public library. Actually, this statement is a sad commentary on the state of affairs of intellectual property rights and property rights in general. It is in exactly the same vein that the gardens claim ownership to photographs of their plants.

What is more interesting about both the gardens' and the library's position is that the claims in all cases, are patently false and at the very least, fraudulent. For example, later on in the New York Public Library's Terms and Conditions is the following:

1.  Low Resolution Files (Only Non-Commercial Uses Allowed).  Materials downloaded from the NYPL Websites may only be used for personal, educational, or research purposes.  They may not be used for commercial purposes. 
2.  High Resolution Files (All Uses Allowed, Including Commercial Uses).  High resolution digital files of photos in the Library’s Digital Gallery are available for editorial and commercial use for a reproduction fee.  For more information, please go to: www.nypl.org/permissions. 

 Reading on in the Terms and Conditions it is evident that what is intended is that the Library does not want to get into the position of violating copyright law. But they are still charging a "reproduction fee" for downloading documents they do not own and which, in many cases, are clearly in the public domain, for example, photographs taken in the 1800s in the United States. It is the law in the United States that once a work is in the public domain, you cannot originate a copyright interest in the work buy mere possession or ownership.

What is at the heart of all of these issues are claims of ownership and control. The real question is who owns the public. In all of the cases, the putative owners do have sizable investments in the gardens and libraries. Neither would exist unless someone paid for their creation and upkeep. I have no problem with paying a use or entrance fee to a park or garden. I also have no problem paying taxes to support libraries, what I do question is when these entities go beyond providing a service and claims ownership.

If I create a work, I can claim a copyright interest. But, if I plant a tree in my front yard, can I stop people from taking a picture of the tree? Do I own the copy right to an image of a tree, I did not take?

Tintypes were not made of tin and other interesting facts about photography

Tintype of Annie Shrock Wright and Joseph Bidmead Wright, M.D. (1859-1944), on tricycle, circa 1900

Some family photo collections may contain a photo made on a sheet of metal. The substrate was iron and no tin was involved in the process. The use of the word "tin" was a derogatory reference to the quality of the images and the fact that they were inexpensive and commonly made by photographers working in fair and carnivals. See Wikipedia: Tintype.

The invention of photography is now commonly attributed to Nicéphore Niépce (b. 1765, d. 1833), a French inventor. In 1829 Niépce entered into a partnership with Louis Daguerre. Due to Niépce's death in 1833, Daguerre was forced to continue his investigations of the photographic process alone. He announced the invention of a photographic process, now called the daguerreotype was first mentioned in print in 1837 and made public in 1839. See "History of Photography Timeline" and "William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) and the Invention of Photography." See also Wikipedia: Daguerreotype.  At the same time, Henry Fox Talbot in England was developing a process of fixing images on paper using a coating of silver nitrate. Deguerre published his findings while Talbot was still working on his process. Talbot presented his findings before the Royal Society in January and February of 1839. Talbot's process was called a "calotype" from the Greek kalos, meaning beautiful. 

The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful process for producing images. The process was introduced in America in the early 1840s by Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph code and by 1853, an estimated three million daguerreotypes were being produced in the United States. See Wikipedia: Daguerreotype.

By the 1860s most of the daguerreotypes disappeared to be replaced by ambrotypes and tintypes. It takes some degree of expertise to distinguish between these early image types. As stated in the Wikipedia article on ambrotypes:

The ambrotype (from Ancient Greek: ἀμβροτός — “immortal”, and τύπος — “impression”) or amphitype, also known as a collodion positive in the UK, is a positive photograph on glass made by a variant of the wet plate collodion process. Like a print on paper, it is viewed by reflected light. Like the daguerreotype, which it replaced, and like the prints produced by a Polaroid camera, each is a unique original that could only be duplicated by using a camera to copy it.

The ambrotype was introduced in the 1850s. During the 1860s it was superseded by the tintype, a similar photograph on thin black-lacquered iron, hard to distinguish from an ambrotype if under glass.

Both the ambrotype and the tintype are usually found in a folding type case. In my own family, there is a measure of controversy over an early example of an image purported to be of one of our more prominent ancestors. Unfortunately, the original has not been examined by photographic experts and the provenance of images is less than established. The claims of the proponents of the image as being of our ancestor have uploaded copies of the image to popular family tree websites such as FamilySearch.org with the claim that it shows the ancestor in question. Other than a claim to an oral assertion that the image is the person in question, there is no other proof that the image is as claimed. I hesitate to either give the purported attribution of the image or provide another online copy due to the fact that after examining all the facts and analyzing the photo's image, we conclude that the image cannot be our ancestor but shows other members of his family. If you would like to see the full discussion, you can go to "The Tanner Family Daguerreotype: Conclusion" on my daughter's blog.

As part of the legacy left by my own family, I received a collection of many thousands of photographs made and acquired by my Great-great-grandfather Charles Godfrey DeFriez Jarvis and his daughter, my Great-grandmother, Margaret Godfrey Jarvis Overson. All of that collection has been digitized and many of the photos are now uploaded to the FamilySearch.org website. You can find the photos by searching for "St. Johns" as a search term. Part of that collection consisted of glass negatives. Quoting from the Wikipedia article, "History of photography:"

In 1839, John Herschel made the first glass negative, but his process was difficult to reproduce. Slovene Janez Puhar invented a process for making photographs on glass in 1841; it was recognized on June 17, 1852 in Paris by the Académie Nationale Agricole, Manufacturière et Commerciale. In 1847, Nicephore Niépce's cousin, the chemist Niépce St. Victor, published his invention of a process for making glass plates with an albumen emulsion; the Langenheim brothers of Philadelphia and John Whipple and William Breed Jones of Boston also invented workable negative-on-glass processes in the mid-1840s.

In the 1880s the photographic process passed into the era of the paper film. Quoting from the same Wikipedia article.

Ultimately, the photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements in the first 20 years. In 1884 George Eastman, of Rochester, New York, developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman's Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest". Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others, and photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.

Of course, in my time, the whole process has passed from light sensitive paper or glass to digital images created by light sensitive electronic sensors. Subsequently, there has been an explosion of images and now there are million, if not billions, of genealogically significant images available online. Here is one of my recent photos just for fun.

Digitizing Genealogy -- Beyond Resolution to Standards Part One

This is a continuing series of posts about the subject of digitizing records and photographs for the purpose of documenting and expanding genealogical research. In writing this series, I am trying to tread the mid-ground between being overly technical and simplistic to the point of ignoring real technical issues. It would be extremely easy for me to lapse into a jargon filled discourse on the finer points of both scanning and photography, but in interests to trying to help the average person, who is neither a professional archivist nor a professional-level photographer, I will continue with my attempts at making the entire subject understandable. If I fail in my efforts, there is always the venue of comments. I hope to make this series more of a discussion than a lecture. So, as always, I will welcome comments and may incorporate the issues raised in any comments into future posts.

While I am trying to make the subject of scanning and photography as they are used by genealogists more understandable, I am constrained by the fact that both areas are, in fact, highly technical in nature. In both scanning and photography, there is a level of use that is casual in the extreme. The practitioner slaps a piece of paper on a scanner and clicks the machines external scan button and makes a copy of the document. The casual photographer pulls out his or her smartphone and snaps away without out a thought about the process of using the photo for any particular purpose. All you have to do to see this in action is go to any event involving a celebrity and watch dozens (hundreds0 of people pull out their phones and take instant photos.

The real question is whether or not what we do as genealogists involves more than what is accomplished by the casual use of a scanner or a camera? At the other end of the spectrum of the users of these technologies, are the professionals whose concerns and demands sometimes seem incomprehensible and trivial to the average user. I have probably looked at millions of documents and just as many photographs over the years and I am often baffled by what is called professional. Photography is both an art and a science. But sometimes what passes for art is just bad photography.

As genealogists, we get a lot more out of a good photographic image than we do a "bad" one. We also get a lot more information out of a good scanned image than we do a bad one. This is particularly easy to illustrate with photographic images. Here are two photos from my huge collection that illustrate this point:

For the purpose of illustration, the identity and location of this image are not important, but it is a photo of my paternal grandparents' first home in St. Johns, Arizona. You can click on the image to enlarge it. Here is another image of the same home:

From a technical and even a genealogical standpoint, both of these photos are really bad. But the question raises, are there any other photos of the home in existence? The answer is that these are the only two photos I have showing the home shortly after it was built. The present home has been substantially modified and looks entirely differently than the photos. Here is a more current photo of the same house:

Do we throw away the old photo because it is bad? There are some who would probably do so, but the reality is that the first two photos, as bad as they are, are priceless because they document the construction of the home and show the condition of the property that can never be recaptured. By the way, the color photo is not that great either but the detail is much better and the lighting shows the house.

The answer to this quandary is that we cannot impose our own present standards on the past. We need to recognize that historical documents are just that, historical, and not decide on the quality of the images from our own more recent perspective.

At the same time, we also need to understand that our own technology enables us to do a much better job of preserving our own record and those we can rescue from the past.

In the next installments, I will discuss what our present standards are from both a practical and professional level. You might be surprised at the huge conflict in opinions at both levels.

Here are the previous posts in this series. You can also scroll down in the right hand column and see the Labels for the category of Digitizing Genealogy.

http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2015/03/digitizing-genealogy-resolution-is.html
http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2015/02/digitizing-genealogy-scanners-vs-cameras.html

World-renowned photographer Nancy Borowick -- RootsTech Keynote Speaker

 https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/

Quoting from an email announcement:

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH—RootsTech by FamilySearch, the world’s largest family discovery and genealogy conference, and Pictureline, a gold sponsor at RootsTech 2024, are excited to announce Nancy Borowick as a main-stage keynote on Friday, March 1, 2024, and part of the globally broadcasted event. Pictureline is sponsoring Nancy Borowick, a world-renowned Sony Artisan photographer, speaker, and teacher, with a unique gift and talent for capturing the moments to not be forgotten—a great fit for RootsTech’s global audience and this year’s theme of “Remember.” Learn more at RootsTech.org. 

RootsTech invites a wide range of talented celebrities to its annual event’s main stage. Each one has offered different perspectives and inspiration regarding the importance, diversity, and yet uniqueness, of each family, and the importance of uniting with your family and remembering who you are. Nancy Borowick will continue that strong tradition as she takes to the main stage at RootsTech 2024 on Friday, March 1, 2024. 

You can read more about Nancy Borowick on her website.  

Here is a further quote from the email announcement:

Borowick’s family has left an indelible imprint upon her life. They taught her that life is precious, to live it on her own terms, and to face uncertainties courageously. She saw both her parents struggle with stage 4 cancer together, passing away just a year apart. She honored them with a special photography tribute and book that celebrates their strength and grace while illustrating the simultaneity of life (see The Family Imprint: A Daughter’s Portrait of Love and Loss).

"I'm so excited to speak at RootsTech 2024! Family, memory, and storytelling through photography is an integral part of my life and work, and I can't wait to share my personal family journey and story in Salt Lake City at RootsTech 2024." Nancy Borowick, RootsTech 2024 Keynote 

Nancy Borowick graduated from the International Center of Photography and has made a career as a photojournalist, author, teacher, and speaker. Borowick’s work has been exhibited in more than 100 cities worldwide, as well as in many notable publications such as National Geographic, Time Magazine, O the Oprah Magazine, Glamour magazine, Le Monde, Stern magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and outlets such as CNN and Bloomberg. A few of her many renowned accolades and awards include World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, and the 2018 Humanitarian Award from the organization Women That Sour. 

While teaching photography classes to children in rural Ghana, Borowick learned of the villagers’ need for a fresh water well and spearheaded a project to raise the monies needed to provide one. She also sponsors an initiative to honor and help mothers heal from the trauma and grief of losing a stillborn child and to reduce public bias regarding pregnancy care and infant mortality.

"Pictureline is pleased to be a part of RootsTech 2024 and to sponsor renowned Sony Artisan Nancy Borowick as the Friday morning keynote speaker. Photography has a way to foster memories, bring together communities, and strengthen relationships. Our camera store has been part of RootsTech for over 10 years, and we love seeing how passionate RootsTech attendees are about helping bring life to their genealogy through photos and videos. We are excited to see how RootsTech will inspire all of us again this year.” —Jens Nielsen, founder, Pictureline

Meet Nancy Borowick in Person

Join Nancy Borowick on the RootsTech main stage as she shares her enthralling family story of what family and memories mean to her, and her personal perspective on the RootsTech theme “Remember.” Following her keynote address in Salt Lake City, Utah, Nancy will hold a meet and greet and book signing. 

Attend RootsTech 2024 in person at the Salt Palace Convention Center, or online for free. Learn more or register at RootsTech.org. 

Walking Arizona gaining on Genealogy's Star

Prickly Pear flower with two colors. This is a picture I took some time ago, but I always go back and revisit my archives for more photos to put on my websites. 

Many of my readers know about my alter-ego as a photographer. My photography blog, Walking Arizona, has over a thousand of my photos. Interestingly, Walking Arizona is quickly becoming more popular than Genealogy's Star. Is there a message here? Maybe I need to focus more on photography and less on genealogy? (just kidding, I have too much to do in genealogy). Actually, the two passions are complimentary. I do a huge amount of photographic work in genealogy, especially using the camera to digitize documents, photographic negatives and other items. Both genealogy and photography can be the basis for a lifetime of learning and improvement.

In my photography mode, I also do panoramic 360 degree images. You can see some of them on my blog PhotoArizona260. These types of photos are much more involved than my other photos and so I don't post to that site as often as I would like to. In my dreams, I could spend all my time wandering around the state of Arizona and the rest of the country, taking photos and posting them online. But reality sets in and I get back to teaching, blogging and working on genealogy.

Writing for FamilySearch TechTips and other activities

Writing a Blog, any Blog, separates the compulsive writers from the not-so-compulsive writers. Writing two Blogs is really the hallmark of the terminally possessed. When the number passes three, the whole activity begins to take over your life. I once had six different Blogs going at one time. Not even I have that much to say every day. It didn't take long before some of the Blogs began to wither on the vine. I started to throw baggage overboard, as I could see the storms of life coming and, as they say, the handwriting was on the wall (or in my case the Blog).

Genealogy's Star now has well over 1000 posts and I feel comfortable with the idea that I will probably keep writing until the grim reaper comes or I kick the bucket. The fascinating thing about genealogy is that it is the cat's meow. I can keep going on because the topic is as fascinating as snake charming.  (If you are still reading this, congratulations, you now know what it takes to write a Blog, day after day, sometimes your mind starts to wander and you begin to imagine life without words pouring out of your finger tips)

On the other hand, not being satisfied and seeing the green grass on the other side of the fence, I kept my Walking Arizona Blog going. Mainly because of the dream I had, that I would some day retire as an attorney and go back to graphic design, this time in the form of working full time as a photographer. Walking Arizona began to evolve into my sporadic photography Blog. Let's just say, if the number of people who read that Blog is any indication, I will have heart break hotel time being a photographer, post-law.

So time passed, the scene now changes to the time when my retirement from law is a reality. But meantime, I make a lot of new friends and acquaintances in the genealogy world. Some of them include people who actually work at genealogy including a few at FamilySearch. The folks at FamilySearch throw me a curve ball, they want me to write for a new website which turns out to have a series of names but has a fascinating idea, promote technology among genealogists. I agree and suddenly I am writing post after post for a website that doesn't really exist. Eventually, the world turns, and the site goes public with a mention at RootsTech. I would like to say that it took off from there, but guess what, it is like living a double life now, writing for my daytime job at Genealogy's Star and Walking Arizona and then sneaking out late at night to write for this underground Blog disguised as a website.

Finally, FamilySearch decides that the site will have a real name and calls it FamilySearch TechTips. Still tucked down in the corner, fighting for menu bar space, it is the unknown stepchild, but I am still writing post after post about all this techy stuff and having it posted online which is what compulsion is all about.

Did you catch the fact that I was back up to three Blogs? Retirement has its attraction, no more clients, no more time keeping, no more 100 e-mails a day, no more judges, no more courts, no more lots of things I can certainly do without. But what is retirement? Writing three Blogs? This reality brought me back to the dream of photography. I decided to bite the bullet and start another Blog. This time I am serious, this will be the basis for my photography business. I start PhotoArizona360 which promptly sits there for months without any activity because I am still going to court and returning calls from clients.

Time flies, I am finally at the cusp of retirement from law and I activate my connection with Google Earth and 360Cities.net and go into photography or is it blogography with four Blogs now?

Will our hero survive writing four Blogs? Will he keep turning out tech stuff? We he have time to do anything else? Turn in for next exciting installment whenever.

Blogging: A Conversation with the World

One of the most surprising (to me) statistics from blogging is the number of readers in countries such as France, Germany, the Ukraine, Russia, China and even Poland. It reinforces my feeling that in blogging about genealogy (or any other subject for that matter) I am really having a personal conversation with the entire world. I guess it is hard to understand that I can carry on such a conversation sitting at a computer in Provo, Utah or Mesa, Arizona.

One of the strangest things about blogging, especially about a topic such as genealogy, is that I am always surrounded by people who, (A) have absolutely no interest in the subject of genealogy and (B) have never read a blog and in addition, have no idea what a blog is. The contrast between the semi-unreal online world and the real world surrounding me gets more pronounced every day. In addition, I can't even begin to speculate how what I say would even sound like in Russian or Polish.

Granted, genealogy is a universal subject and transcends any international or social boundaries. I have spoken Spanish nearly all my life and I cannot imagine translating some of things I say in my blog into Spanish. Even if I were to translate every word perfectly, the cultural and social context of my blog posts would be lost. So how do I explain the popularity of my blog in non-English speaking countries? All I can guess is that genealogy supersedes these limitations and addresses a basic human experience.

The one thing that I think is important about writing a blog, no matter the subject, is that you are totally and completely saturated and immersed in the topic. I eat, sleep and live genealogy, all day, every day. Contrary to the question I am most asked, I do sleep. But I often wake up with an entire blog post planned out in head. I do not either encourage or even suggest that anyone become so involved in a single topic, even if that topic is genealogy. But on the other hand, I certainly can understand how such a fixation is possible.

In analyzing the reason for my interest, I believe that it is based on the complexity and unpredictability of the subject. If genealogy were not so difficult, it would not hold my interest. Law, linguistics, history, weaving, photography, computers and many other subjects have caught my attention, but it only genealogy that has the characteristics that keep my mind fully occupied, day after day, week after week, year after year. If you think the practice of law is unpredictable, then you need try going to court day after day. But law is really a narrow subset of genealogy, as are all the other disciplines. In its broadest sense, genealogy includes practically every other study and learning. Genealogy deals with the entire spectrum of human experience put in the form of the most complicated detective story ever written.

Realizing this, it is not only possible but probable, that passionate writing about genealogy would have an attraction to all who realize the importance and central role of the subject, no matter their cultural or linguistic background. Of all the subjects I have embraced, photography comes the closest to having the attraction of genealogy. Both photography and genealogy are ways of dealing with the details and at the same time, the complexity of the world. Much of the time, I see the world as a discrete series of photographs.

I also find it interesting that both genealogy and photography will never lead to fame, fortune or even notoriety. They are narrow subjects and the only people who achieve a measure of fame are those who are involved in the business of both. I am long past the time of my life when I need to be involved in business. So, I write. I teach and sometimes, I take photographs. It reduces life to a pretty simple regimen. Oh, I almost forgot all the rest of my very complicated life for just a second. I guess I was writing in terms of the unreal world rather than the sometimes harsh reality.

Photography Basics for Genealogists: Part One: Orientation

Genealogists accumulate a lot of photos and those who travel and do onsite research end up taking a lot of photographs also. We also accumulate a lot of photos from our family activities. This new series is going to discuss all of the aspects of photography from cameras and lenses to the planning and making of the photograph itself and on to the preservation and display of photo collections. I am going to start out with an example of what can happen to make a poor quality image.

What is wrong with this image? Here is a list of some of the obvious problems:

• Out of focus
• Not level or tipped at an angle
• Underexposed
• No identifiable objective
• Bands of light probably from light leaking into the camera
• There are double images indicating camera movement

How much of this was due to the camera? the lens? the photographer? the subject matter? the choice of the subject matter? or all of these issues? Well, from other photos by the same photographer, I know that she can take adequate photos with none of the same problems. But I also know that she was prone to taking photos where the image was not level. This photo could have been of an identifiable subject, but the lack of focus simply makes the photo unusable. 

It is not unusual to find yourself in a "once-in-a-lifetime" event or situation. Weddings, births, funerals, birthdays, and many other family events will never occur again and it can be heartbreaking to learn that most (or almost all) of the photos of the event did not turn out well. It is also not unusual for people to spend a considerable amount of money hiring "professional" photographers for wedding events. Historically, these special events photos may be the only ones that ever got taken since cameras were rare and film and development costs were expensive luxuries.

Today, cameras are owned and used by a majority of the people in the world. All of the world's smartphones and most of the world's mobile phones have a built-in camera and current statistics indicate that there are more than a billion more mobile connections than there people on the earth. To be more exact, there are 3.3 billion smartphone users in the world today, or 35.13% of the world population and 5.13 billion people have mobile devices or 66.53% of the people in the world. Not everyone has a phone or other device, but many people have more than one so there are more connections than there are people. See "How many people have phones in the world?" 

As part of this series, I will be including some of the history of photography and how to recognize the different kinds of historic photographic processes. Except for the historical perspective, I will primarily be writing about using the present equipment, such as smartphones, for taking photos and archiving records and artifacts. There may end up being some overlap with my ongoing series on digital preservation,

I think I should end today's post with a really good photograph from the same photographer who took my bad example above.

This is a photo of my Grandfather Leroy Parkinson Tanner and his bride my grandmother, Eva Margaret Overson.

Now over 2,000,000 words

I began using Grammarly.com consistently back on October 8, 2017. That is about 30 months ago. Since that date, the Grammarly program has logged all of the words I have written using the program (primarily as a spell checker). Accordingly, as of the date of this blog post, I have written 2,004,441 words. Of course, I have written many more than that because the program did not and does not work with a lot of the other programs I use such as Microsoft Word (this week Grammarly.com announced support for Microsoft Word). By the way, Microsoft is coming out with an app that will work with the Microsoft Office 365 program (soon to be Microsoft 365) that will have similar features called Microsoft Editor which will be available on April 21, 2020. See "Introducing Microsoft 365."

As I may have written previously, I seem to have traded off talking for writing. When I was younger, I talked a lot but as I grew older, I started to write more and talk less, although now I sometimes talk to myself.

Obviously, you can take classes on learning how to write. Perhaps my writing would have been better over the years if I had actually taken classes in writing. But somehow, I think that writing over 2 million words is probably a good way to learn how to write. Depending on the complexity of the subject matter, I can spend quite a bit of time re-reading and revising what I write, but usually, I do the revisions as I write so I can write more. It does take time and a lot of thought to write but once I have a subject, I can usually just explain what I have in my head. However, I often need to do a lot of research both before I start and while I am writing.

I think that my first "serious" writing began when I was in my late teens and early twenties. My first attempts were writing poetry and I ended up studying the History of the English Language as a second major to my degree in Linguistics so I did take a few English classes. I was also employed on a National Science Foundation project to develop a sequenced instructional program for teaching poetry to Middle School students. I wrote a lot of poetry but then just stopped. Subsequently, I began to dream of writing novels, mostly science fiction. I did write a few but never pursued trying to get any of them published. Meanwhile, I started writing and technically publishing a huge amount of legal stuff while in law school and afterward while working as an attorney. The blogs came about as a development of my legal writing. Here is a link to the first "Genealogy's Star" blog post I wrote back on November 21, 2008. Check out the FamilySearch Wiki. You can see that I have come a long way from those early attempts.

Now, I am at blog post number 5,718 just from those blog posts for Genealogy's Star. My other passion is photography. I have gotten to the point of publishing books, I think I am author and co-author on about 25 or so books and I do publish my photos on Adobe Stock and sell a few from time to time. I think a lot of authors and photographers assume that "selling" their work is a validation of its worth. Since there are probably billions of photographers now and maybe just about as many authors, I am not deluded enough to think that I could ever make any serious money from writing or photography although that might have been the case if I had decided to focus on writing or photography much earlier in my life.

I guess I will end this blog with a photo I took recently.

This seems appropriate for the time being. See https://walkingarizona.blogspot.com/

A stitch in time, in genealogy, saves nine (photographs)

What if you are confronted with a document that is much larger than your scanner's bed? What if you are confronted by a large map hanging on the wall of a library that will not fit in your camera's viewfinder even at its widest angle? All of these issues have been answered and resolved for many years. The issue was recently raised again by The Ancestry Insider in reference to an upgrade to Microsoft's Image Composite Editor. How can I say this gracefully? Well, I can't so here it is: Microsoft is not in the image business and their software is not usually mentioned in the world of composite photographs.

Composite or "stitched" photographs have been in existence almost since the beginning of photography. If you would like to see some of the early attempts at panoramic photography see The Library of Congress' (LOC) Prints and Photograph's division. The LOC has about 4,200 panoramic photos in the online catalog.

Making large either panoramic or composite photographs can be accomplished today either through mechanical photographic means by using specialized cameras and lenses, or by using an ordinary camera and specialized software. If you would like to see how to do it with specialized equipment visit one of many sites such as GigaPan.  Another example of the current world's record for a Gigapixel photo is the huge photo of London on 360Cities.net that I mentioned recently in a recent post.

There are any number of programs available to turn your individual photos into a composite. These programs are generally referred to as photo stitching programs and may be free with your camera or cost many hundreds of dollars. One notable program is Canon PhotoStitch, which comes with the purchase of most models of Canon cameras. You can get a free download at Cnet Download.com.

Another very popular and sophisticated program that does a really good job of photo stitching is the latest version of Adobe's Photoshop, Photoshop CS5. Previous versions also did a good job of photo stitching which Adobe calls "Photomerge."

I use some dedicated programs that do a wonderful job of making composites while adjusting the exposure and to some extent, the distortion. I can recommend PTGui Pro and Pano2VR. If you want some basic instruction in how to make composite (stitched) photos go to the PTGui website for links to instructional tutorials.

I have been taking composite photos since the early 80s when I was asked to produce a composite of a proposed road grade for a highway development by an engineer. At the time, the computer software available was very limited, but by manually stitching the photos together we were able to produce an acceptable composite. The problems posed by The Ancestry Insider have long since been resolved. This is not an area that the non-photographer non-computer person is going to be successful in initially, as it takes a pretty high degree of both photographic and computer skills to make really good composites. But if all you need to do is get the information, almost anyone can get a very good stitched photo using either Canon's software or similar products.

I could go on and on, and probably will in the future, now that I have gotten started in one of my specialized areas of knowledge. In all fairness, I should probably disclose that I have been in the graphic design and photography business, including making composites, for about 25 years (in addition to my law practice).

Mystery Photos from the Overson Photographic Collection

It has been sometime now since I uploaded a batch of mystery photos from my Great-grandmother's vast photographic collection. I am uploading many of the photos taken by my Great-grandmother, Margaret Godfrey Jarvis Overson and her father, Charles Godfrey DeFriez Jarvis. Some of the photos were also taken by Henry Victor Overson, my Great-Uncle and my Grandmother, Eva Margaret Overson Tanner.

All of these photos are in the Memories section of the FamilySearch.org website and are tagged to Margaret Godfrey Jarvis Overson KWZZ-YBN. You can find all of the unknown photos by searching for "St. Johns" in the Find link. You should include the quotation marks in your search. You will find all the photos tagged to St. Johns in this way, including the unknown ones taken by the Jarvis and Overson families.

If you know someone with roots in Apache County, Arizona, please encourage them to browse through the photos and tag any that they can identify.

Here as some interesting photos that I uploaded recently.

Comments on Scanning Photos

 

Film-based photos are one of most common genealogically valuable documents that genealogists acquire. In some instances, the number of photos acquired can be overwhelming. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true, some genealogists are fortunate to have any images of their ancestors. The earliest photographs date from the 1850s but photography only became common from about 1870. Film photography is no a specialist interest among photographers. Almost all photography is now done digitally. 

The first digital camera was made in 1975 by Kodak engineer Steve Sasson. The original digital camera was about the size of a breadbox, and it took 23 seconds to capture a single image. See "Timeline: The evolution of digital cameras, from Kodak’s 1975 digital camera prototype to the iPhone." The Apple QuickTake camera in 1994 is considered to be the first digital camera under a $1000 that was generally available. The QuickTake camera has a sensor that was slightly more than 1 Megapixel. In 2007, Apple introduced the first iPhone with a built-in camera with a 2MP (megapixel) sensor and 2GBs of memory. 

Much of the advancement of present-day smartphones has focused on the built-in camera. Some smartphones are being advertised with up to 200MP sensors. But close examination of the claims show that the high number is actually equivalent to a 12.5MP camera, the ones current installed in Apple iPhones. 

For genealogists, the smartphone camera revolutionizes research. A researcher, with permission from a library or archive, can collect images of individual records making obsolete the need to use paper and pencil to make handwritten copies. Meanwhile, digitization efforts by a multitude of online websites are adding billions of digital copies every year. 

What about the existing collections of photos and documents in the possession an individual genealogist? New digitization equipment is measurably speeding up the process. My daughter and her family recently spent a couple of days removing over 9,000 photos from a pile of photograph albums. They then took the photographs to the Brigham Young University Family History Library and digitized the entire 9,000+ images in a few hours. The whole process could have been accomplished in two days. They used the library's high speed Epson FastFoto Wireless Photo & Document Duplex Scanner that can scan as fast as 1 photo per second at 300 dpi (a resolution of 300 dots-per-inch) Higher resolution scanning is available but takes measurably longer to produce and image. In this case, there is no intention of discarding the original photos, but as many of us have noticed, the quality of paper-based photos deteriorates over time. 

If you own a smartphone, you already have a way to digitize your documents. Several tools have been developed to enhance the use of smartphones in digitization process from stabilization devices such as tripods and boom arms to light boxes. 

One of the most sophisticated and reasonably priced solution is the Shotbox.me. This device expands you ability to take good photos using you smartphone or even a dedicated digital camera. 

Shotbox.me

At RootTech 2022, Ancestry® announced a system of apps for uploading photos. See "Ancestry® Integrates Photomyne's Best-in-Class Technology to Help Mobile Customers Upload, Scan, Enhance and Share Family Photos" Quoting from the article:

Unlike other scanning tools, Photomyne’s AI technology uses the phone’s processor and their proprietary algorithms to:

• Auto-detect image boundaries and auto-crop photos
• Scan multiple images from one page and split into individual images
• Enhance and restore the quality of images

In addition, MyHeritage.com announced the addition of a remarkable extension to his suite of photo enhancement and colorization apps that animates the story of an ancestor's life called LiveStory.  See https://www.myheritage.com/livestory

One of the great challenges of acquiring so many digital images is the process of indexing and identifying them. Both Ancestry® and FamilySearch.org have implemented sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) based handwriting recognition programs that will reduce the time now taken to index records from years to days. See Ancestry® to Apply Handwriting Recognition Artificial Intelligence to Create a Searchable Index of the 1950 U.S. Census.

However, when it comes down to processing a huge collection of paper-based records, the time-consuming part is still identifying and filing them in a retrievable fashion. I keep searching for the ultimate way to work through my tens of thousands of documents, but I always end up looking at each, one-at-a-time. 

Digital Map and imagery Collections

I have a son who is presently working at the University of Florida and because of this I noticed that they have one of the premier academic map collections in the entire United States. From their Map and Imagery Collections page I found the following statistics:

The Map & Imagery Digital Collections includes materials from the University of Florida's Map & Imagery Library andDepartment of Special and Area Studies Collections, particularly the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History and theUniversity Archives. The physical Map & Imagery Library Collection contains more than 497,800 maps, 266,500 aerial photographs, 2,250 remote sensing images, and 7,215 atlases and reference books. It is the largest academic map collection in the Southeast, and among the top five academic map collections in the entire United States. The Map & Imagery Library has general map coverage world-wide. Specialties of the collection include Florida, Latin America, the United States, Africa, and the Holy Land.

Well, so now I was interested in finding out the other four huge university collections. Oh, I might note that the University of Florida also has the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Florida.

Before I go on in my search for the other four, I think it is important to note that maps should be the genealogists constant companion. Too many times when I quiz people about their genealogy, they have no idea where are of the places they find are actually located. For this reason, many of the places are incorrectly identified or confused. I suggest that identifying on a map each and every location you cite in your research is important. Many of the current genealogy programs will do this automatically except not so well for places that no longer exist.

The next major university collection I came across was the Library of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Their collection is described as follows:

MIL's collections of maps, aerial photography, satellite imagery and other spatial data exceed 5 million information objects. As of 1992, MIL was ranked as the number one spatial data collection in the top 100 members of the Association of Research Libraries. According to the 2006 Guide to US Map Sources, MIL is the third largest academic map collection in the country. 

Aerial Photography and other remote sensing data 

The imagery collection is composed of 2.8 million aerial photographs and an unknown amount of satellite images stored as part of the legacy Alexandria Digital Library collections. New to aerial imagery? Check out our aerial photography tools to learn how to find flights covering your area of interest and read indexes. We also have a page that describes major portions of the collection.

OK, so UC Santa Barbara is the third largest academic collection. Where are the others? It turns out that most universities have a map collection. That means there are thousands of map collections around the world. Another large collection shows up at Yale University. Here is the description from the website:

The Yale Map Collection has the largest collection of maps in Connecticut and one of the largest university collections in the United States. Its collections are geographically comprehensive and consist of over 200,000 map sheets, 3,000 atlases, and 900 reference books.

There seems to be some overlap between claims to the largest collections and the largest digitized collections. Some of the libraries have extensive collections of paper maps with only a small percentage yet digitized. I would think that there would be a huge amount of duplication in these collections. For example, the USGS has all of the U.S. topographical maps with many of them digitized. I assume that most of the other map collections contain these topographical maps. This is the case with the claim by the University of Kansas T.R. Smith Map Collection as follows:

The Thomas R. Smith Map Collection, located on the first floor of Anschutz Library at the University of Kansas, is among the largest academic map collections in the United States. The map collection includes over 440,000 paper maps and air photographs, covering all areas of the world, with particular strengths in maps of Kansas and of the U.S.A.

It would probably be a really good idea to search for maps from universities in the areas where your ancestors lived. This would be a good place to start. As for identifying the largest map collections in libraries, it turns out finding out which are the largest is very difficult due to differences in the way the collections are described.

Here is one compilation of websites that you might want to see: Images of early maps on the web. Have fun looking at maps.