Al Lustie's Tips and Tricks

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 . . .

1. look for the name of someone in the picture
2. upload the picture, with a probable date
3. 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. . .