Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Never-Before-Seen Photos of New York City are now Online

Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the Internet. The city's Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database with photos from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Unknown No More: Identifying A Civil War Soldier

NPR has a great story about identifying a previously-unidentified enlisted man in a Civil War uniform. Tom Liljenquist and his family have collected 1,000 of these such photographs and donated them to the Library of Congress. But the photographs don't feature generals and other high-ranking officers. Instead, they're images of the enlisted men who fought for the Union and the Confederacy during the war. And only a handful of the soldiers have been identified.

Create Your Own View-Master Pictures

Remember the View-Master? If not, look at http://www.image3d.com/. I had one as a child and spent many hours with it. When my children were young, I managed to find a new one and gave it to them as a gift and they also used it for hours. However, View-Masters were scarce by the time I had children. I had some difficulty in finding one. Now, View-Masters are easy to purchase on the Web and also may be found in some toy stores (see http://goo.gl/xSh3b). Even better, you can now create your own Viewmaster disks (or "reels") that will work in all View-Masters, old and new alike.

Invented in 1938 by William Gruber, a piano tuner by trade and a stereo photographer by hobby, the View-Master was introduced in Portland, Oregon in 1939. However, it wasn't until the following year at the 1940 New York World's Fair that the world began to pay attention.

View-Master devices are now sold by Fisher-Price.

Student Invents Robotic Technique to Scan a Treasure Trove of Pictures

A student-invented robot will help preserve and archive 115 years of photographic black history in Baltimore, and could soon be made available to museums and archives around the country. He devised Gado (a West African word for inheritance), a $500 3-foot-wide by 2-foot-deep robotic arm that is able to lift flat and delicate materials using suction, place them on a scanner and scan them into a database or computer file system. It scans one image every two minutes.

Thomas Smith, creator of the robot named Gado, spent a good portion of his senior year at Johns Hopkins tinkering on the machine, an open source robotic scanner designed for sensitive archival materials.

Where is Your Family Photo Album?

Most of us have photo albums in our families. The albums typically are thick books with celluloid pages and contain photographs of the family over the years. Now here is a question: when was the last time you added a photograph to that album?

Today, we typically keep our pictures on our computers, or our phones; we display them on Facebook or some other networking site. We rarely print them out, even though the technology to print glossy photographs from our computers has been available for years. Instead, we trust them to technology and many people are not prepared to save the photos for decades. Today's photographs may be lost to our descendants.

Inkjet Print Survivability

Would you like to print your digital pictures and then preserve those prints for years? It can be done but you must be aware of several issues involved. Newsletter reader Jim Loudon found some excellent online articles that describe those issues. Jim writes:

Hi Dick.

Enjoy the column, been reading it since your ancestry.com days.

I don't know if you or your readers would be interested in this, but Mike Johnston over at his blog, The Online Photographer, has two recent columns nominally concerning the permanence of inkjet-printed photographs but really more about the long-term survival of photographs in general. The URLs are:

Fairfield, Maine Historical Society Receives Grant to Preserve and Digitize Photo Collection

Maine State Archivist David Cheever recently announced the Fairfield Historical Society will receive a $1,890 grant to preserve and provide better access to its historical photo collections as part of the Historical Records Collections Grant Program. The grant allows the society to copy its entire photo collections and provide access to them. The photos will be available at the Fairfield History House.

Rare Photo of Slave Children Found in NC Attic

A 150-year-old photo was recently found in a North Carolina attic that shows two young black children. One was named John and the other is unidentified. Art historians believe it's an extremely rare Civil War-era photograph of children who were either slaves at the time or recently emancipated. The photograph was found with a document detailing the sale of John for $1,150.

Several art experts have examined the photograph and stated they believe it was created by the photography studio of Mathew Brady, a famous 19th-century photographer. The photo probably was not taken by Brady himself but by Timothy O'Sullivan, one of Brady's apprentices. O'Sullivan took a multitude of photos depicting the carnage of the Civil War.

Saskatchewan Archivists Seek ID for "Lovely Lady in a Hat"

Do you recognize this lady? If so, Saskatchewan's archivists  would like to hear from you. (Click on the photo to see a larger image.)

The Saskatchewan Archives Board has many unidentified photographs. In an attempt to reach more people who might have knowledge of some of the subjects of the photographs, the Archives Board launched a blogsite where it is posting pictures and seeking feedback, hoping people might recognize a face or a location or even help with a time frame for a picture.

i-gotU GPS Device for Your Digital Camera

This must be the ultimate gadget for that photography buff on your Christmas list. “i-gotU” is a tiny device that tracks where you have been. That's it! All it does is track your location. With a built-in GPS satellite tracking receiver and 16 megabytes of built-in flash memory, the i-gotU device records your exact location (plus or minus ten feet or so) every few seconds and stores it in memory. It will store up to 65,000 locations, each recorded with the exact time you were at that location. What makes this device so useful is the included software that allows the stored locations to be used in so many ways.

Perhaps the most obvious use is in digital photography. You can automatically add geotags to every photo. That is, if you carry the i-gotU device in your pocket or in your camera bag, and if you make sure the date/time information in your camera is accurate within a very few seconds, you can always record the exact location of every picture you take. The latitude and longitude can automatically be added to each picture. That can be really useful for recording vacation trips or for hiking in the mountains or even when taking pictures at the family reunion.

As soon as you plug in i-gotU GPS Logger to your computer, your trips and current position are displayed effortlessly on Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, or Bing Maps.

Digital Cameras for Genealogists

It's Christmastime, and I suspect someone is asking, "What would you like for Christmas?" I'd suggest the answer might be, "A digital camera!"

Of course, a digital camera is always great for taking family photographs. Millions of people do that every day. However, for the genealogist, a camera can serve as a multi-purpose tool. It's even better than a Swiss Army Knife!

My favorite use of a camera is for snapping pictures in a cemetery. It serves as an automated notebook, recording the transcriptions. However, even better, the resulting images serve as source citations for the records you keep. I cannot think of a better source citation than an image of the words that were etched in stone. Of course, you will want to record the date, too. This is easy to do with most digital cameras that will optionally record the date and time on every picture taken.

A Collection Of Pre-1930 Awkward Family Photos

This isn't genealogy-related but I suspect anyone who has spent time looking at old family photographs will appreciate these. Take a look at http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/a-collection-of-pre-1930-awkward-family-photos.

Check out the beard of the gentleman in photo #2!

My thanks to Robert Landau for telling me about these.

(+) Geotagging Photographs

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

This may not help much with old family pictures, but geotagging can be a major addition to digital photographs. In short, geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification to digital photographs, video, websites, or even RSS feeds. The information added typically consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, but it can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names.

Collaborative Picasa Web Albums

Picasa is one of the most popular online photo publishing services available. However, it has always been a place to publish your photos for others to see. Now Google (the owners of Picasa) have introduced Collaborative Picasa Web Albums. Every album on Picasa Web Albums is potentially collaborative: multiple people can add pictures to the same album.

You can now create a Picasa account and then your, your siblings, your cousins, and others can upload pictures to the same albums. This should be a great method of sharing family photos, whether they be from the late 1800s or from last week's family reunion.

Preserving Wedding Pictures

We live in a high-tech world, but I am not always prepared for it. Today my daughter and her new husband sent out their wedding pictures... electronically. It is a Picasa photo album on the web.

I'm thrilled that she could share those pictures so easily with friends and relatives. She doesn't need to wait for guests to come visit before she can pull out the photo album to show the pictures. Today's technology allows for fast and convenient distribution. In fact, everyone can keep a copy of as many pictures as they wish on their own computers, something not easily accomplished a few years ago.

At the same time, I have to wonder about long-term preservation.