Say cheese!!

The last few days I've been sick, so now that I'm finally on the mend again, I can blog about my favorite topic - genealogy!!

A few weeks ago, Lisa and I took a trip up to my grandparents' house in Marysville. My grandma has three old photo albums full (and I mean full) of pictures, over 550 pictures between the two books I've already scanned and identified. On this trip, my grandma spent about 4 hours identifying people in these old photos while I took notes, and we finished going through the whole album! We'd already spent 2 or 3 previous trips on this same book, so it was no small task going through those pictures and pointing out who was who. But now the third album was all identified, and just needed to be scanned. From May 25th to today, I've scanned 71 pages of pictures, each page having an average of 6-12 pictures. I've still got another 12 pages to go, but I'm on the downhill side of it finally. Right now I'm scanning full pages (well, technically it's half pages, as the pages are too big to fit completely on my scanner), and later on I'll go into Paint.Net or something and pull out (digitally speaking) each picture into its own file. Here's a sample of what I'm working with:

These pictures are from a lumber mill my great-grandpa worked on back in the 40s with his brothers. It's been amazing to go through these photos and get to see some of my ancestors - my great-great-grandma Mary Hoffman, her daughters Rosie (my great-grandma) and Mary and their families, my great-grandpa Charles Wagner and his brothers and their families, and their cousins and their families - and get to see little snippets of the times they lived in. Maybe someday I'll have someone help me identify the makes and models of the cars and trucks they drove, and other neat little details like that.

The main thing I have to figure out - how do I preserve these in a way my kids and others will be able to see them and appreciate them? I might burn them to CDs and send them as Christmas gifts or something. I can't just hoard them on my hard drive - they don't do many people much good that way. Maybe I'll have Lisa help me on that one. She's the artistic one of the two of us. We'll see. For now, I have to get them digitized. One step at a time.