Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Putnam County, Tennessee, Begins to Scan Documents

Glenn Jones, Putnam County Archivist, recently received a grant from the State of Tennessee to digitize the Patton Papers to make them accessible to anyone anywhere. “The amount of records she collected is amazing,” Jones said. “Maurine Patton worked on these for years and she wanted them preserved.” Those records — totaling thousands of pages — are documentation of numerous families from all over the region in a chart organization.

National Digital Newspaper Program

I have written before about the National Digital Newspaper Program but not for some time. The Program continues to grow and expand, so perhaps it is time to go back and look at it again.

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress have partnered to enhance access to historic newspapers for many years with the National Digital Newspaper Program. This long-term effort has developed an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Best of all, the information on the National Digital Newspaper Program is available free of charge. At this time, 6,025,474 newspaper pages are available.

Work Under Way to Digitize 1500s Florida Records

Inside a Catholic convent deep in St. Augustine's historic district, stacks of centuries-old, sepia-toned papers offer clues to what life was like for early residents of the nation's oldest permanently occupied city. These parish documents date back to 1594, and they record the births, deaths, marriages and baptisms of the people who lived in St. Augustine from that time through the mid-1700s.

J. Michael Francis, a history professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, and some of his graduate students in the Florida Studies department have spent the past several months digitizing the more than 6,000 fragile pages to ensure the contents last beyond the paper's deterioration.

How to Achieve Virtual Immortality

What do we know about our ancestors? In most cases, we know their names and perhaps a few important dates in their lives, such as birth, marriage, or death. We might know the names and important dates of their family members. In a few cases, we might even have a few grainy photos. Now, let's turn the tables: what will your descendants know about YOU?

J. Peder Zane writes that people of today have the ability to leave a cradle-to-grave record of their lives so that 50, 100, even 500 years hence, people will be able to see how their forebears looked and moved, hear them speak, and learn about their aspirations and achievements. A growing number of gerontologists also recommend that retirees should engage in the healthy and productive exercise of composing a Life Review.

Snow Byte and the Seven Formats: A Digital Preservation Fairy Tale

I have written often about the need and the methods of digital preservation. However, I have to admire Tess Webre, an intern with NDIIPP at the Library of Congress, for her article on the same topic. Individuals should start understanding the basics of digital preservation. Tess suggests that, with children creating digital files earlier and earlier, it should be taught as early as possible. The question, of course, is how to get youngsters interested in preserving their data. Fortunately, Tess was able to find a digital preservation fairy tale in the digital archives of the Brother’s Grimm.

The tale of Snow Byte and the Seven Formats may be found at http://goo.gl/hhwOD.

Free Scanning at RootsTech 2013 with Mocavo

Did you know that Mocavo.com offers free scanning of documents with historical value? Actually, Mocavo.com offers this service all year round but is also offering a free "drop off" service at the Mocavo.com booth at RootsTech 2013 in Salt Lake City. Details may be found at http://blog.mocavo.com/2013/03/free-scanning-at-rootstech-2013-with-mocavo.

Genealogist's Family Safely Escapes Fire that Destroys Home and Old Family Photographs

The MLive web site has a sad news/good news/sad news story: The sad news is that genealogist Beth Bourque and her family lost their home in Plainfield Township, Michigan, in a fire. The good news is that the entire family escaped safely. The other sad news is that everything in the home was lost, including hundreds of old family photographs.

You can read the full story in an article by Aaron Aupperlee on the MLive web site at http://goo.gl/tulPI.

Have you digitized your old photographs and stored them OFF-SITE?

Historic Tillyer Collection in Southbridge, Massachusetts is Being Digitized

The Tillyer Papers Volume I: People, Progress, and Poverty in Sturbridge 1738 — 1880 has recently been digitized by Historian Brian Burns and master photographer Robert Arnold.
 
In 1968, the Tillyer family of Southbridge, Massachusetts, donated an eclectic collection of approximately 3,000 pages of historic documents to Old Sturbridge Village. The Tillyer family was related by marriage to the Chamberlain family of Sturbridge. Of that family, A.B. and Clifford Chamberlain, father and son, were town clerks for nearly 75 years, from 1866 to 1945.

Scanning: Do It Yourself or Outsource?

The Library of Congress Digital Preservation newsletter has an article that will probably interest anyone thinking of scanning family photos, slides, negatives or film. Quoting from the article:

"At our personal digital archiving events, we get various questions about scanning family photos, slides, negatives and film. Questions like:  What type of scanner should I use? What resolution should I use? How can I scan negatives? While we’ve focused on developing tips and resources for saving personal digital materials created with software and hardware, we recognize that individuals have the both analog and digital materials and are looking for guidance on how to deal with both.

Storing Data for Thousands of Years in DNA

Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) near Cambridge, were pondering what they could do with the torrent of genomic data their research group generates, all of which has to be archived. Then they got an idea: store the data in DNA.

Minnesota to Digitize Old Adoption Records

Minnesota plans to make it easier for people researching their family histories to access old adoption information by digitizing roughly 5 million pages worth of records, including some that date to the late 19th century.

The records are stored on about 2,000 rolls of microfilm at the Department of Human Services. The agency put the job of digitizing the records out for bid last month, saying it shouldn’t cost more than $67,500.

Details are available in an article in the St. Cloud Times at http://goo.gl/fWzlk.

Webster County (Mississippi) Courthouse Burns

Burnt courthouses are more than a problem of years past, they still burn today. Webster County and the village of Walthall lost some records this week. Damage is minimal to records kept in vaults. There is some heat and water damage. Steps will be taken to dry them out. Officials say all the computer-related information is secure.

You can read more in an article by Susan Parker in the WTVA-TV web site at http://goo.gl/epGLd.

Priceless Documents from Texas' Early Days Survive a Hurricane and a Fire

After surviving a hurricane, a house fire and storage in a Tweety Bird gym bag, a treasure trove of hundreds of historic letters and documents from the turbulent years of the Texas Republic has made it back into state hands.

The next-to-last stop on the tortuous trail of The Texas Legation Papers from 1835 to 1845 was a unique five-year custody arrangement with TCU under which professors and graduate students got a firsthand look at history that had effectively been lost for more than 160 years.

You can read more in the Star-Telegram at http://goo.gl/DgTSD. My thanks to newsletter reader Betty Clay for telling me about this article.

Announcing the Mocavo $25,000 Community Digitization Grant

If you are involved in a genealogy or historical society and if that organization has a lot of materials available, you will be interested in this generous offer. The following announcement was written by Mocavo:

At Mocavo we are working with our online community to bring all of the world’s genealogical information online for free putting everyone’s family history within reach. Through ReadyMicro, Mocavo’s digitization group, we are pleased to make available a $25,000 grant to enable other stewards of genealogical content to share that information with the world.

Mocavo seeks proposals from organizations that care for genealogical content, archives, or historical records that they wish to make freely available online.  Materials proposed for digitization and/or indexing should be unique and provide clear value to a broad number of genealogists. ReadyMicro will digitize these materials and, in collaboration with the grant recipient, extract associated metadata.  Mocavo will create an online database from the collection which will be freely available at Mocavo.com as well as the grant recipient’s website.

Mocavo Announces Free Scanning Service

I would expect this to become a VERY popular service. Let the experts do all the work, using high-quality industrial-grade scanners. You also cannot beat the price: FREE.

The following announcement was written by Mocavo:

It always seems like there aren't enough hours in the day or enough days in the week, doesn't it? Take a look around you. Do you have piles of research laying around? Old books gathering dust? Historical documents sitting in boxes?

From now until the end of the year we will scan your documents, send you a digital copy, and put them online at Mocavo -- for FREE! We work with our community to bring all of the world’s genealogical information online for free putting everyone’s family history within reach. We are bringing lots and lots of historical information and databases to Mocavo; but, don’t let us have all the fun. Join in!

Back Up Your Data, Wherever It Is

A newsletter reader today wrote to draw my attention to an online article in Wired at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/11/megaupload-data-what-to-do/ that describes a problem with lost data. An online file storage service, called Megaupload, was closed down by authorities because of questionable copyrights practices. I wrote about Megaupload before, see http://goo.gl/nf3DG for my past articles.

In short, anyone who entrusted their information to Megaupload lost all that data when the authorities shut the servers down. In my opinion, those people got what they deserved. The article in Wired ignores one of the basic rules of data processing that has been true for 50 years or more: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."

Michigan to Preserve Historic Electronic Records

The State of Michigan has joined the effort to preserve records with historical value. Officials say Michigan is the first state to sign a contract with Tessella, which specializes in digital preservation solutions, technology, consulting and research.

Officials say the move provides significant cost-savings. Details of the agreement were not disclosed.

You can read more in an article in the Detroit News at: http://goo.gl/p1CWq.

 

Digitizing 18th-century French and Spanish Records in New Orleans

A marathon project is under way in New Orleans to digitize thousands of time-worn 18th-century French and Spanish legal papers that historians say give the first historical accounts of slaves and free blacks in North America. Yellowed page by yellowed page, archivists are scanning the 220,000 manuscript pages from the French Superior Council and Spanish Judiciary between 1714 and 1803 in an effort to digitize, preserve, translate and index Louisiana's colonial past and in the process help re-write American history.

The documents tell of shipwrecks and pirates, of thieves and murderers, of gambling debts and slave sales, of real estate deals and wills. One finds pages signed by historical figures like Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, better known as Bienville, the founder of New Orleans, and Louis XVI, the king of France. And the bizarre, as in the case of a man accused of selling dog meat to Charity Hospital.

Thousands Of Court Files Damaged By Water, Mold

Here is another reason to make digital copies of paper documents whenever possible.  Thousands of county court files in Greeneville, Tennessee have sustained extensive water, mold and mildew damage that Circuit Court Clerk Pam Venerable said she discovered on Monday.

A video of the damage can be seen on the GreenvilleSun.com web site at http://www.greenevillesun.com/videos/866. The video shows records being packed up and sent to a Michigan company for "freeze drying" and attempted restoration. Judging from the video, I doubt if all the records can be salvaged.

Insects Destroy Idaho County's Historic Documents

Here is another reason why we need to digitize as many records as possible as quickly as possible. Digital records won't REPLACE the originals but having extra copies will certainly help PRESERVE information in case the originals are damaged for any reason.

Officials in southern Idaho's Lincoln County are taking steps to deal with a rash of paper-eating insects blamed for destroying a collection of historical documents.

Lincoln County Clerk Suzanne McConnell says volunteers discovered the damage as they were working to digitize old, paper records, including court judgments, birth certificates, marriage licenses, land deeds and permits. The records - some dating back to the 1930s - were all kept in the vault below the county courthouse.