Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Going Crazy With Scanning...

It has been a month since the last update on my scanning project, and I'm sure y'all are eagerly anticipating this update ;-) At that time I had completed scanning my personal photographs and had a good start on Mom's pictures, which netted a little over 3,800 image files in a three month time period.

The prep work for the most recent group of pictures has taken considerably longer than the actual scanning. I didn't keep track of the time, but it consumed a lot of hours. However, in the past week I've scanned another 845 family pictures! With that, the albums for my two brothers and myself are done! Done, I say! Yay! That's the good news. Bad news is that the pictures for my sister's family still need to be scanned - they are being sorted and organized by my niece. My guess is there is a couple hundred pictures yet to be scanned. Big Sigh. But the end is in sight! At least, for the pictures… genea documents are still waiting.

While sorting the family pictures I came across a bunch of photos from Phend Reunions. Those were pulled out and put with the Reunion albums. Then I organized the Phend Reunion papers from the 1960s through the present day and put them in the albums with their corresponding pictures. Scanning the papers and pictures resulted in 615 image files. (The Phend-Fisher Family Reunion Ledger which covers the early years had been scanned, transcribed, and posted to the blog in the latter part of 2007.)

Then, as I was rummaging through a box looking for something I came across my grandmother's genealogy "book" and realized that I had never scanned it in its entirety. Most of the pictures had been scanned at one time or another but not all of them, and not the family group sheets. The book has a "post-hole" type of binder that easily comes apart so it wasn't a problem to scan each page individually and then put it back in its proper place. The pages are just a little bit larger than legal size. Placement on the scanner was critical so that no data was lost. There were 90 pages with 116 pictures, ending up with 206 scans for that project. I went ahead and scanned all of the pictures again because I wasn't really happy with the previous scans from several years ago.

And, as reported in my 3rd update for the Genea-Blogger Games, I scanned 74 newspaper clippings on the Phend family that were in the Whitley County Historical Museum's "family clippings" files. I've since created a name index of the clippings for reference purposes.

Image files created from scanning in the past month: 1,611
  • 845 family pictures
  • 206 pages and pictures in Grandma's Genealogy Book
  • 486 Phend Reunion documents (sign-in sheets, announcements, flyers, etc.) and pictures
  • 74 Phend Family newspaper clippings
Total number of scanned image files created since mid-April: 5,434

Maude Wise Brubaker Yontz, aka "Mama" or "Grandma Bill", with her grandchildren. About 1933. From the Genealogy "Book" of my grandmother, Hazlette Brubaker Phend, which is now in my possession.

5 comments:

footnoteMaven said...

This is absolutely amazing!

Girl, you're just plain good. There must be some special medal for this amount of work.

fM

Anonymous said...

In properly done projects, the planning often take more time than the scanning.

I admire your persistence.

Becky Wiseman said...

Thanks fM and Amy. I'm at that point where I just want to be done! I'm so tired of sorting and scanning pictures it isn't funny.

fM - Not sure I'm "good" rather just plain stubborn! I've been working at this for four months so it isn't really part of the Genea-Blogger games. But I accept your virtual medal in the same spirit in which it was given.

Thank you both for your kind words and encouragement.

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

I think it will take me years to scan that much! Congrats!!!!

Gini said...

Wow that is amazing, what an accomplishment! When I retire, I hope to accomplish the same. Thank you for sharing.