Videos Honoring Timothy Wesselowski: His Life and Funeral Service

The Videos

Documentary on My Grandpa's Life

My Grandpa's Funeral Service

My Grandfather's Death

On the 2nd of January, 2021 my Grandpa Tim Wesselowski passed away at the age of 80 years old. He had contracted COVID-19 in the month before and died as a result of the accompanying pneumonia. Unlike many who met the same fate in the last year, he did not die alone. My Uncle Nathan was by his side and my Mom was on speaker phone. My Uncle had spent the prior day with him doing one of his favorite things: watching football with family.

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

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.