Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

A Family Tree on the Tombstone

Don't you wish that all tombstones included a list of family members? Here's a picture I took in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vermont.

Click on the thumbnail image to see a larger picture.

ScanCafe

Do you have some pictures that you want to digitize? Would you also like to restore the color or to fix "speckles" and scratches? The answer is simple: scan them. Well, that's a simple answer unless you have a few thousand old family photographs to convert. Sitting in front of a scanner and manually feeding in a thousand or more old photographs is not a chore that I envy. Now there is a new service that will do the hard work for you: ScanCafe.

ScanCafe is based in India, where labor charges are lower. Real humans do the scanning and analyze the results. This is not an automated service of "feed everything into the hopper of an automated scanner and hope that it all works." Each scan is made by hand and then reviewed by human eyes.

Kodak Kills Kodachrome

Remember the mid-1970s song by Paul Simon, with the catch-phrase: "Mama don't take my Kodachrome away?" It's time to have a talk with Mama.

Eastman Koadak has announced the company will no longer sell Kodachrome film, ending its 74-year run. Kodachrome is a complex film to manufacture and requires a complicated process to develop, and today there is only one lab left in the country that processes the film.

Worst Photo Album Ever

Do you have family photographs stored in those "magnetic photo albums?" If so, get rid of them quickly. They are eating your photographs.

The Practical Archivist writes, "These chemical sandwiches of doom were popular from the 1970s through the 1990s. All of my childhood photos were carefully placed in this style of album. Ironically, the photos I never got around to organizing are in better shape."