Digitizing Your Family History
(Family Tree Books) by Rhonda
Mcclure
Excellent Guide To A Relatively Newsubject
Family historians know the value of preserving precious family heirlooms--
old letters, diaries, photographs, Bible pages. Yet most have limited, if any,
knowledge of the technology needed to safely save these items.
Digitizing Your Family History gives readers the tools they need to keep
these records permanently. Theyll learn to: * Utilize a scanner to best
save photos and documents * Get maximum results from digital cameras
* Enhance vintage photos through electronic editing * Work with printers,
PDAs, and more to preserve family records * Organize digital records for
easy access in later years With McClures instructive guide, genealogists
will learn how to better preserve their family memories for future
generations.

Personal Review: Digitizing Your Family History (Family Tree
Books) by Rhonda Mcclure
When my father died a few years ago, my mother began systematically
sorting through eight decades of accumulated stuff and giving the next
generation "first dibs" on anything they wanted before the remainder was
discarded. Of course, I took anything relating to the family's history,
including old correspondence, military and employment files, and about
forty pounds of old photo albums and several shoeboxes of loose
snapshots. I'm slowly, steadily working my way through them, scanning not
only photographs but also documents and old letters into a digitized
format, cleaning up some of the older items with Photoshop, writing up
brief text files (to be attached to the image files) explaining those people,
places, and circumstances I could identify (and also transcribing my
mother's penciled notes from the backs of many of the photos), and
collecting everything in some sort of order on CDs for later distribution to
the rest of the family. (Christmas is always coming.) Now, I'm reasonably
computer-savvy and I have professional training in archival conservation,
so all this seemed pretty obvious to me, but that probably would not be the
case for many non-techies.
Rhonda McClure to the rescue, as she has often done before! She begins
by explaining at length the opportunities digitization offers for preserving
(which is increasingly simple with a home computer) and disseminating
documents and photos (via CDs and the Web). Then she discusses the
relevant technology, including what to look for in an inexpensive flat-bed
scanner (under $100 these days) and a digital camera (under $200 now for
a good one). The "Imaging Road Warrior" chapter is excellent; she
recommends keeping a journal of research and sites visited in your word
processor. (I never travel without my laptop, digital camera, and a small
combination scanner-printer.) She also does a good job explaining the
"why" of image-editing and enhancing vintage photographs without drifting
too far into the "how" (which would take another book, and would be too
software-specific anyway), and suggests isolating faces of individuals in
group shots for attachment to database entries in your chosen genealogy
software. (I confess that had never occurred to me.) Digitizing and
preserving audio- and videotapes is something I know very little about, but
she seems to cover all the bases there, too. Then comes sharing and
publishing (in the broadest sense) what you've digitized - which is half the
point of doing all this in the first place. Even knowing that the pace of
change in technology will cause sizable parts of this well-written volume to
become outdated in a couple of years, I strongly recommend it.
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