Photos - More than First Meets the Eye

Of  course, everyone loves old photos. At first glance, they're pictures of your ancestors. Your mother's family, a family gathering at some special occasion. You figure out who's in them and when it was taken and add them to your database. How often do you go back and look at them? I mean really look. In your mind, look at them as if you've never seen them before. Look in the background, at the expression on people's faces, at things that are not the focus of the picture. Do this and it's possible you can figure out things that were really going on. Here are few examples from my collection.

Scanning Photos

After Mom's funeral, I volunteered to take her photo albums and boxes of photos, scan them in to the computer so all of her children could have a copy. Finally, after nearly four months, I finished scanning in over 1400 photos. Then I purchased six USB thumb drives, copied the photos onto them, along with a copy of my genealogy database and all documents associated with my genealogy work. While I don't expect all of my brothers and sisters to be interested in browsing the family tree, if all they have to do is hold on to a thumb drive, they won't mind acting as my emergency backup. Never forget to back up your data and put it at a location away from your main computer.

I've already posted some interesting photos from her collection. Here are a few more that I found interesting.