Your Quick Tips, 24 March 2008

20080324- 15 mi E Fish Ck NV PR Wiley 1917_edited-1.bmpLabeling Electronic Images
When scanning in old family photos to share with the family, I add the information, such as name, place, and date, to the border of the print. I use an image editing program to do this. If the photo does not have a border, I create one. If a person wants to print the photo and does not want the information it is easy to crop off, but by keeping the label, the photo and identification will not be separated.
 
(The image here on the blog is an example. Click on the image to enlarge it.)
 
Diane Harman-Hoog

External Hard Drive–Worth It
The cost of purchasing an external hard drive is out-weighed by the many hours, pictures, memories, and information that could be lost should your computer crash. I back up to both drives each time I work on my family tree. It is an inexpensive insurance policy.
 
Adrene Tomie
Lethbridge, Alberta

Cemeteries Online
I live in Ontario, Canada, where tracing my family’s pre-1870 ancestors can be a major challenge. I use cemetery transcriptions and photographs of grave markers online to help find names of spouses or location of deaths for a family. From the information found on grave markers, I can easily connect to area civil and church records. This virtual traveling has helped me to break down many brick walls.
 
Lise Hébert
Ontario, Canada

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6 thoughts on “Your Quick Tips, 24 March 2008

  1. Dianne or anyone else in the know;
    Can the name, place, date etc. be added to a photo using PhotoShop Elements? Can you tell me what to look up in the help section of Elements to give me details.
    Thanks so much.
    Ferne

  2. Ferne,
    First you expand your “canvas” size (you can “lock” the existing picure so it only expands your canvas in one direction). Then use the text function to type the text in. When finished I select “save as” and save it is a jpeg file if you want to share (other wise unless you “flatten layers” it saves in photoshop’s format). I though I would also leave your original “unedited” scan because you lose a tiny bit of quality every time you edit and save a JPEG file – that way one copy is like a negative and one copy is labeled for sharing. I hope this helps.

  3. Adrene,
    I also regularly backup to external hard drives (plural) – keeping one at home, where I can update any time I add to the genealogy… and keeping a second hard drive at a friend’s home, which I switch off with the one at home at least once every month (more often, if I have added a LOT to the family history). A back-up is a MUST, but what if your backup is in the same location as your computer and then you have a fire, or other tragedy? You could lose both at the same time!

  4. Lise,
    An addition to your excellent suggestions about Canadian research: I live in the U.S., but my mother was Canadian, so many of my ancestors lived in Ontario. I recently found that the Ontario death records available on Ancestry.com can provide a wealth of family information. Depending on the year the person died, you can get (among other things) their street address, place and date of birth, cause of death, name and place of birth of parents and spouse (often including a maiden name), the ethnicity of all of them, and often (if the person was elderly) the name and address of a son or daughter who acted as source of the family information. The on-line records go from 1869 to 1935 (one year’s worth of records is added to the database per year. For deaths after that, if you qualify as living “next of kin” you can obtain long or short (definitely get the long) death certificates from the office of the Ontario Registrar General — go to:

    http://www.gov.on.ca/ont/portal/ut/p/.cmd/cs/.ce/7_0_A/.s/7_0_252/_s.7_0_A/7_0_252/_l/en?docid=121591

    They explain who qualifies as “next of kin” and you can order birth and marriage certificates as well. If you don’t know the exact date of the event, they will search for you within a 5 year range. I have been amazed at how much new information I have been able to obtain through these sources.

  5. Hi

    The Elgin County Branch of the Ontario Genealogy Society has transcribed the pretty well all of the Elgin County Ontario Cemetries and have these transcriptions on line thru their above website. For anyone searching for family from Elgin County, Ontario Canada you may want to check this out as it is a real gem.

    Carol Fletcher, Ontario Canada

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