How to Scan in Post Cards So The Front and Back Stay Together

I recently received a package full of old post cards, books, and tin types among other things from my great uncle. They are amazing; its so incredible to be able to read the handwriting of ancestors from over a hundred years ago. I started scanning them in, of course, but soon ran across a problem. How could I quickly and efficiently save the fronts and the backs of the post cards at the same time? After a bit of searching I found a solution.

First make sure you have scanned in your post card, both front and back separately. Make sure they are cropped properly as well. If your printer does not crop your photos for you automatically then I recommend installing Irfanview. Irfanview is a free and open source photo viewing software that comes stacked with a variety of options- including an 'Auto Crop Borders' tool that will trim off the extra white space for you.

The 'Auto Crop Boarders' Tool in Irfanview

Why you should switch from Evernote to One Note

It seems like a lot of people choose to use Evernote instead of One Note for organizing/compiling their research. I too had fallen into this mindset. Then one day while I was adding some photos to a note I got a message that made me completely change my mind:

Writing a Biography Part One: Research and Citations

When I first started doing genealogy I knew that my goal would ultimately be to write biographies for as many of my ancestors (and their families) as possible. After lots of trial, error, and research I have finally begun this process. My next several posts will be a series that will go in depth on every step I now follow when writing these biographies.

Step one: Organizing Research and Preparing Citations

This is, of course, the most important step. It's important to have documentation that supports your facts; it prevents mistakes and false assumptions from being made and allows anyone reading the biography to reference back to the original sources and verify your information. I personally use Legacy Family Tree software to organize everything. It has a very organized system for citations that makes it fairly simple to add meaningful and useful sources to your work.

Take, for example, this newspaper article:

How to use github to host your genealogy website for free (for complete beginners)

I was looking for ways that I could host my small, work in progress, genealogy website for free. All the options seemed to have negatives that outweighed the positives, or had limited storage amounts and no guarantee of long term hosting. Then I remembered Github pages. This will be a full tutorial on how to do what I did for complete beginners. It will assume you have a website generated by your genealogy program. (I recommend GRAMPS as a good free program.)

The end result will be something like this (my website):

https://reneeschmidt.github.io/Genealogy/individuals.html

What is Github?

Github is a code sharing website. It is mainly for open-source projects, which means projects where the code is free for viewing by anyone who wants to.  This is the link to the github homepage: https://github.com/ .

Getting Your Github Account

Simply go to github and create a free account, Its that easy!

Installing Everything You Need

Downloading GIT

GIT, unfortunately, does not work with just the website. You will need to install an application on your computer in order to get it to work.

First go to the following link: https://git-scm.com/downloads

Click on the operating system that you are working on. In my case its windows so I clicked the “Windows” button.

Funeral Cards

I was searching through my basement when I came across a box stuffed full of old pictures and old items. It turned out it was my dads old family heirlooms and keepsakes. Inside were some old funeral cards for lots of my relatives both distant and direct. Since I don't think there are any other surviving copies of some of these cards I figured I'd post them here for posterity:

Agnes York Funeral Card

Died September 3, 1950

What I've learned from scanning in excessive amounts of photos

To say I have a lot of photos would be an understatement. I bought myself a 1 terabyte hard drive to keep all of them on, and I've already used up a quarter of the space. About 30,000 of these photos are of me and my sisters (my dad was a bit excessive with the photos when we were little), and about 700 are photos I've scanned in. The first hundred or so I scanned in using the scanner on our printer.

Our printer, as I quickly discovered, is meant for printing- not scanning. It moved at a snail pace and scanned in at a max of 600 dpi, which is fine for most pictures but with certain exceptionally tiny pictures a larger dpi is necessary. It also only scanned pictures in as jpegs. I don't like jpegs at all. They are too unpredictable for scans in my opinion and since so much data is compressed in them and detail lost they reduce the maximum possible quality and detail I can instill in them with photoshop. I much prefer png or tiff. Another problem with my printer scanner was it only scanned in 1 picture at a time and the automatic cropping was poorly done. Sometimes I'd have to put construction paper under my photos so it didn't crop off parts of the picture and crop manually later on.

Luckily for me my dad mentioned an old flatbed scanner we had in our basement. As soon as I started using it I knew I could never go back. Its an Epson Perfection 3490 photo and its perfect. Of course when I first started using it I decided I would scan every photo in at the max dpi. My tip to you is: don't do this. Every photo was half a gb and it was a pain to resize them all. I usually go with 700 for small Polaroids and 400-500 dpi for the more modern and larger Kodak film. But, once I got that figured out it was amazing. I can scan in and label 300 photos in a few hours because it allows you to scan in multiple photos at once. And its speedy. If you don't have a good scanner like this it is well worth the investment.

And now I'll finish with some of my favorite photos I've scanned of the Wesselowski / Byers side of the family. (most of these have been photoshopped for quality)

Helen Byers Basketball Captain 1926 as a senior in high school.