Scanning
My friend, Jim, and I were visiting about this and that, and I mentioned going through thousands of old snapshots my mother had taken and saved, back in the days of film cameras. I threw most of the away. Jim said, and I agree, there was something else to do with them.
Scan them and save them. Annotate the ones you can. Use the free month you can get from Ancestry.com to . . .
- look for the name of someone in the picture
- upload the picture, with a probable date
- continue
Why? In fifty or a hundred years someone may be doing a genealogical search on this person and some kind of picture would be appreciated. This widens the data pool a lot.
On another note, Evernote Premium recently introduced the ability to scan business cards and organize them. If I was still working in the business world I would sure pay the premium price and do this. I may do it anyway. I'd set up iPod Touch up on the little tripod I bought and scan for a few hours. Then, using the sync feature I would be able to call up anyone's card from my computer, iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch when I wanted that person's data.
Then there are my own personal artifacts. I should either scan or photograph them as well. Diplomas, pictures of note, pictures of my dad in WWII, the program of my mother's violin recital. . . and add them to the ancestry.com data bank as well.
What do you think of these ideas? Would this kind of thing be useful for you to do? Leave a comment. . .