Organizing Your Family Photos—Part 2

by Kerry Scott on March 1, 2010

Last time we talked about the mechanics of starting to organize and scan in your pictures.  Today I want to share a few of the genealogical clues I found when I went through 300 or so of my oldest family photos.  Part of the reason my project took so long is that I spent the bulk of my time analyzing the photos.  It was worth it.  Here’s a sampling of some of the clues and other cool things I found (click on the photos to see a larger version):

This is my great-grandfather, Arthur Walter Scheiber, in 1931.  I’ve often wondered how my ancestors fared during the Great Depression, and this gives me a clue.  Art was a railroad worker for most of his life, but this photo seems to indicate that he may have also sold used cars on the side for a period of time.  The back reads, “Dad’s pal Grimm calls this ‘Scheiber’s Breadwagon.’ He (Mr. Grimm) has this picture right over his desk.  He sure likes my dad,” in Art’s son’s handwriting.

This is my grandpa, Donald Arthur Scheiber, in about 1918.  That’s his mother’s handwriting on the photo at the top—it says: “Donald & Sport[,] Aunt Martha’s house.”  Sport the Dog appears in a number of photos labeled “Aunt Martha’s.”  He was probably Martha’s dog.  Some of those pictures include people I don’t recognize at all, but Sport’s presence gives me some clue that they’re connected to Aunt Martha’s branch of the family.  That’s a huge help when you’ve got photos of unknown people.  Don’t discount the value of identifying the pets in your family photos!

This is my great-great-grandfather, Frank Scheiber.  His line is the one on which I’ve done the most research, so I’m fairly confident I have all of the family’s geographic moves documented.  The interesting thing about this photo, though, is the photographer’s stamp.  You can’t see it very well here (because no matter what I did, it just wouldn’t scan well), but at the bottom it says, “J. Cole, Carrington, North Dakota.”  Since my research (so far) indicates that Frank and his family never lived in North Dakota, I’m curious.  What was he doing there?  Was he visiting friends or relatives?  Was he looking for land?  Was he on some sort of business trip?  I don’t know yet, but I’ll definitely be looking in and around Carrington for connections to this family.

The woman in this photo is my great-grandmother, Severina Elizabeth Nelson.  The older boy next to her is her brother, Allert B. Nelson (yes, it’s “Allert,” not “Albert”).  The younger boy is their half-brother, Clarence Nelson.  I was thrilled to find this photo, since I don’t have many of Clarence.  As I looked at it, I noticed something interesting about the pin on his lapel:

The button appears to be a picture of a woman wearing a dark-colored dress.  What does this mean?  Is it some sort of mourning custom?  I don’t know, but it’s a great clue (especially since Clarence himself is one of my most elusive ancestors…more on him in another post).

This one is my favorite.  The little boy on the steps is my grandpa, Don Scheiber.  The two women on the left are his paternal aunt, Irma Scheiber, and maternal great-aunt, Martha Erickson Swanson.  The man in the suspenders is his father, Art Scheiber, and the man in the suit is Martha’s husband, Alfred Swanson.  The older woman on the right his is grandmother, Mary Leonora Holthusen Scheiber.  This photo was taken at Art Scheiber’s home at 5411 Emerson Avenue South in Minneapolis in about 1918.  What caught my eye in this photo was the service flag in the corner of the window on the right side.  Art Scheiber had a brother, Edward, who was serving in the military at the time the photo was taken.  Although I think it was a little unusual (at least at this time of the photo) for a brother rather than a parent to have a service flag, I guess it’s possible.  Alternately, it’s possible that Art’s mother was living with him at this time; she was still married to his father, but they seem to have spent some period of time living apart during this period.  But the flag shows two stars, not one.  Could another of the Scheiber brothers have served?  There’s no other evidence of that so far, and they were a little old for service in World War I…but this photo tells me I definitely need to do some digging.

I’ll be working on each of these clues in the coming months.

Next I’ll talk about some of the tools I’m finding to be useful in organizing, analyzing and sharing my family photos.

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Organizing Your Family Photos—Part 1

by Kerry Scott on February 26, 2010

One of the genealogy-related projects I’ve been putting off for, oh, 10 years or so relates to my family photo collection.  I have nearly all of the old photos in my family, and they’ve been sitting in a box, unsorted, for a decade.  Late last fall I finally decided to tackle them.  It’s turned out to be a huge project, but I’ve finally come to a stopping point (at least with the oldest photos in my collection…the modern ones are a whole other animal).  Here’s how I did it:

  • I sorted the photos by branch of the family they came from.  There’s a little bit of overlap, but not much.  Then I separated the photos that show living people from those that don’t, because I want to make sure I’m not putting photos or information on living people on the internet (which is, of course, a bad idea).  About halfway through the first branch of photos, I figured out that I should have also put them in roughly chronological order.
  • I decided to assign each photo a four-digit number, starting with 1000.  This way, I could easily save the photos without having to worry about how to name them after people with unknown names, birth names versus married names, names with multiple spellings, group photos, etc.
  • I created a spreadsheet in Excel to serve as an index.  It has the following columns:
    • Photo number
    • Subject (including full names of all of the known people in the photo)
    • Date (the exact date if I knew it; a good guess if I didn’t)
    • Source (who gave me the the photo)
    • Back (any notes, marks, stamps, or other information on the back; when I recognized the handwriting as belonging to a particular person, I note that as well, since some sources are more credible than others in terms of identifying people and places in photos)
    • Notes (observations, clues, or other information related to the photo)
  • I started scanning.  This part was no fun at all; it’s just as slow and tedious as you think it will be.  I finally started breaking it down into tiny increments, with a goal of scanning/saving/studying five photos a day.  I didn’t make it every day, but when I did, I felt like I was making at least a little bit of progress.
  • I saved each photo as a .JPG with just the 4-digit photo number as the file name.  Right now they’re all in one big directory, which makes it easier to upload them to the web (more on that later).  I later discovered this post by Miriam Robbins Midkiff, which says I should have saved them as .TIF files for preservation purposes.  I’m still glad I did them as .JPGs so I could share them online, but I may go back and re-save them as .TIFs.

Part of the reason this took so long is that I found that working with the collection all at once gave me a unique opportunity to really study each photo.  When you look at them all as a group, you can more easily see patterns…which houses are in the background, which photos show a particular woman wearing the same hat or necklace, etc.  Next , I’ll talk more about the clues I found throughout the project.  Then I’ll share some of the tools I found helpful as I tackled this project.

Photo by purple monkey dish washer

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Long-Lost Relatives: Good or Bad?

by Kerry Scott on February 19, 2010

One thing that’s changed a lot in the 10 years or so since I last worked on my family history research is the internet.  Cousins are easier to find now.  I know, because I just found some on Facebook, while my carrots were roasting for dinner.  It was that easy.

When I started doing research in the early 1990s, you had to look through phone books (remember those?).  If you were lucky, you were working with an uncommon name, and you could narrow it down to just a few possibilities.  Then, you might write a letter…or, if you were really bold, you might call.  You couldn’t be sure you hand the right person, and they couldn’t be sure you weren’t a weirdo or something.

Now, you can look people up on sites like Facebook.  You know you have the right person, because you can see all the people they’re connected to, including their siblings and cousins and teenage children.  You can see their picture before you talk to them, and note how much they look like Great-Grandpa Joe.  If you friend them, they can see everything about you, before they even decide to friend you back.  It’s cool, but it’s a little creepy too (and people…check your privacy settings, please.  Do you really want random strangers seeing all that before you’ve friended them?).

Obviously, I’m into family history, so hearing from a long-lost cousin who wants to share information is generally exciting for me.  However, I know not everyone feels that way.  Sometimes branches of the family have lost touch for good reasons, and other times people have family situations they just don’t want to have to explain to a stranger.  These things can be delicate.

So I’m curious.  What would you do if you got an email or a Facebook friend request from a long-lost cousin?  Would you be excited or annoyed?  Would you think it was a scam?  Would you respond?  Would you be curious to see what pictures and information they had to share, or would you want no part of the whole thing?

Photo by skittzitilby

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