Louise's Lost Files - Scanning Best Practices for Photographs

You've probably heard me (and others) talk about this before. When scanning photographs, you should scan them at the highest resolution and save them as Tiff files. Scanning at highest resolutions will allow you to have the crispest and most detailed digital image of your photograph. Oftentimes, when you zoom in on a photograph scanned at a high resolution, you can see more detail then you can see with your eye. This has come in handy many times when I have tried to identified a person or place in a photograph or tried to estimate when the photograph was taken.

Although JPEG is the standard format for saving images to your digital camera, hard drive, and email, it is a good idea to save your scanned photograph files as TIFF rather than JPEG because TIFF files do not lose resolution each time you open, close, and save a file. You can think of a JPEG file as a kind of compressed file which loses resolution each time it is used.

When to Save as JPEG? 
If you are planning to upload your photographs to your family tree software or online tree, or share with family members via email or a website, then you can save copies of each photograph in the JPEG format. When I scan photographs, I save each scanned photograph as a TIFF file and then I make a copy and save it in a JPEG format. I have two folders on my hard drive - one for my TIFF files and one for my JPEG files.

How to Save as Both JPEG and TIFF files? 
This process can be done several different ways:

1. You save each scanned photograph as a TIFF file, then save as JPEG file directly in your scanning software
2. You save each scanned photograph as a TIFF file, then batch save each one as a JPEG in your photo software
3. You save each scanned photograph as a TIFF file, open each photo up individually and save a copy as a JPEG file

I have the option of all 3 listed above at my fingertips. My scanning software holds all my scanned images in a queue until I'm ready to save them. Then I select the images I want to save, give them all the same name, for example, "Benson Photos," and select what file format I want to save them in. I save all my files as TIFFs first. My scanning software will append a numerical value at the end of each file name as it saves them. I will then go through each scanned image, identify the person or persons in the photograph and name accordingly.

Because I usually rename my scanned photographs, I create JPEG copies using the number 2 option above: I open my photo software called XNView (Windows based) and I select batch process to save all of my photos as JPEGs. It will then make a copy of all of the photos I have selected and save them as JPEGs. This is a very handy tool to have at your fingertips.

My next post will discuss how I name my photos and identify the subjects in each photo.

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Photo: This is a photo of the Canon LiDe 110 scanner downloaded from the Canon.com website. This is my 2nd iteration of this scanner that I have had for 10 years now. It fits nicely in a backpack or briefcase and is fast and easy to work with. The scanning software I use with it is called MP Navigator EX.

Louise's Lost Files - Certificate of Marriage

This is part of my Louise's Lost Files Series in which I share with my readers some of the items I am inventorying, scanning and posting that came from my great-grandmother, Louise Lasiter's house in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

The first part I tackled were two small drawers of paperwork belonging to my great-grandmother. They contained basic household mail items such as bank statements, bills, and tax statements. Intermingled in these mundane household items, however, were a few items of genealogical significance including their original Certificate of Marriage shown below.

Marriage Certificate Louise Benson and James Putman Lasiter, from the personal collection of Ginger R. Smith

It says:

This Certifies

that on the Second day of December in the year of our Lord 1931,

J. Putman Lasiter and Louise Benson 

were by me united in Marriage 

at Tulsa, Oklahoma 

according to the Ordinance of God and Laws of the State of Oklahoma.

Witnesses: Udrah Kaemmerling and Conrad H. Grabradshi [sp?]

Otto LeRoy Curl, Ph.D., D.D.

Pastor University Methodist Episcopal Church

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A little bit about the physical condition of the marriage certificate:

It is a tri-fold and has a piece of braided cord punched through one seam so that when it's folded in 3, it can be tied on the outside. There is also an outer cover which you can kind of see in the scan if you look closely at the bottom. 

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A little bit about my great-grandparents: 

Louise Benson was 19 years old when she married James Putman "Put" Lasiter on December 2nd, 1931. She had been living with her family in Newby, Oklahoma in April of 1930 when the census was taken. According to the census, she was still attending school, so she must have been attending a junior college of some sort because she graduated from Spiro High School in 1929. 

An interesting tidbit of information was that Louise was pregnant with her first child Barbara when she married Put. And yes, I assure you that her first child was Put's. My grandmother and her sister Barb could have been twins, their likeness was so similar. 

James Putman "Put" Lasiter was 23 years old when he married Louise. He was living in Fort Smith, Arkansas with his parents when the census was taken in 1930. According to the census report, he was also attending school. 

I wish I knew how my great-grandparents met with one living in OK and the other living in AR about two hours away. Maybe I will find some clues in the rest of the boxes? In addition to this marriage certificate, I found their original marriage license and I also found a certified copy of the marriage license which was obtained in 1943. 

I wonder what the certified copy was required for? 

Why would someone need a certified copy of a marriage license 12 years after they were married?

They didn't buy their house until 1950, so it could not have been for a mortgage. Hmmm...interesting. 

Running a Targeted Surname Search in my Smith Relatives' ftDNA Results

Now that I have found several Agee matches to myself on AncestryDNA, and I have entered their direct line ancestors into my Family Tree, I wanted to see which of my other Smith family members had matches to descendants of this Agee family. My Smith relatives having matches to Agee descendants would provide further evidence that our Smith family has a common Agee ancestor.

I logged in to each of my Smith family members' ftDNA accounts and searched for the surname AGEE.

This is what my list of results looked like for my cousin Shari. You can see that on the right side of the page, the Agee surname is displayed in blue bolded text. The 2nd match down does not have Agee in their list of surnames. They showed up in the results list because they have Magee in their list of surnames. I did not include them in my list of matches.

In order for the Agee surname to show up in Shari's matches' list of surnames as bolded blue text, I had to first add the Agee surname to MY list of surnames. You can do this by clicking on your name in the upper right hand corner of your ftDNA profile, then clicking the Genealogy tab, then clicking on the Surnames link. 

I added the Agee surname to the surname lists of all of my Smith cousins' ftDNA profiles and then I ran a search for matches who had Agee in their list of surnames. This is what  I found: 

My Relative	Match's AGEE Ancestor
Cousin Mike	1 match to a descendant of Anthony Agee & Christina Worley via their son David
Cousin Linda	1 match who has Agee from France and VA, but no tree (related to Darrel's match who had Agee from France & VA, but no tree)
Cousin Shari (Linda's Half-Sister)	2 matches to a descendant of Anthony Agee & Christina Worley via their son Matthew (these 2 matches are related)
	1 match who has Agee from SC (no tree)
Grandfather Darrel	2 matches to a descendant of Anthony Agee & Christina Worley via their son Isaac Agee (these 2 matches are related)
	1 match to a descendant of Mary Elizabeth Agee & Jean Faure Ford via their son Daniel Ford
	1 match who has Agee from France and VA, but no tree (related to Linda's match who had Agee from France & VA but no tree)
	1 match to a descendant of Frances Agee from Wilkes County GA (same match as Tim)
My father Tim	1 match to a descendant of Frances Agee from Wilkes County GA (same match Darrel has)
Ginger	No Matches to Agee in ftDNA

I then pulled up each relative's Agee match in their chromosome browser and downloaded the chromosome data to excel.  I combined all of the ch data into one excel file and sorted by chromosome number and then by starting location (on the chromosome). The descendants of Anthony Agee's son Isaac and the descendants of Anthony Agee's son Matthew have a lot of overlap on ch 3. My grandfather's match who descends from Mary Elizabeth Agee, sister of Mathieu Agee, did not match up with anyone on more than 5 cM. He did match up on a small segment on ch 11 from 63-67 mil, 4.61cM, 900 SNPs with the descendants of Anthony Agee's son Isaac (not shown).

TESTEE NAME	MATCHNAME	CH	START LOCATION	END LOCATION	cM	SNPs
Darrel Eugene Smith	Descendant-1 of Anthony Agee & Christina Worley via their son Isaac Agee	3	169205391	184359986	19.34	3200
Darrel Eugene Smith	Descendant-2 of Anthony Agee & Christina Worley via their son Isaac Agee	3	169205391	184694720	19.35	3300
Shari Jo JENKINS-Free	Descendant-1 of Anthony Agee & Christina Worley via their son Matthew	3	171575778	180390543	13.09	2000
Shari Jo JENKINS-Free	Descendant-2 of Anthony Agee & Christina Worley via their son Matthew	3	171575778	180390543	13.09	2000

To be honest, I've kind of actually given up on looking at chromosome data to evaluate my matches, but I thought I would include a summary of my cursory findings here just in case anyone was interested. Also, I would need to run a comparison of the matches who are descendants of Anthony Agee & Christina Worley via their son Isaac Agee against the matches who are descendants of Anthony Agee & Christina Worley via their son Matthew to see if they, too, overlap on these same DNA segments. Assuming that Darrel and Shari also overlap on these same segments of DNA, then there is a 3-way match which would indicate a common ancestor shared by Darrel, Shari, and these matches.

If you are also wondering why I did not do this in my last post with my AncestryDNA results, it is because AncestryDNA does not offer the ability to look at your chromosome data. I used to use a 3rd party tool called Gedmatch.com, but that service is no longer reliable, so I just don't bother messing with the chromosome data much anymore.

Next Steps:

1. My next step will be to add the direct line Agee ancestors of these matches into my family tree and cite them as coming from ftDNA online gedcoms. I will then create an abbreviated family tree chart that I can reference quickly to see what matches came from what Agee Ancestors
2. My half-brother's AncestryDNA results just came back so I will run a surname search for Agee matches in his results; if there are several, I will organize them by patriarch and add them to my list of matches. Then I will add their Agee ancestors to my family tree if they have not already been added. I will also compare his Agee matches to mine to see if there are any overlaps. 

Previous Posts:
Looking for Connection to Agee ancestors via Autosomal DNA 

Looking for Agee Ancestors - Building my Match Trees

Louise's Lost Files - Scanning Best Practices for Documents

If you have been participating in Thomas McEntee's Genealogy Do-Over, then you know that one of this week's goals was to digitize your photos and documents. Thomas gave a great overview of scanning best practices for photographs. I had a few of my own ideas to add regarding the scanning of documents - especially pertaining to Louise's Lost Files - my great-grandmother's files I've been working on for weeks. I've outlined my best practices below. How do you scan your documents?

Last week I went through some of the financial records of the last two years of my great-grandmother's life that I found in the two drawer small file box. I also found in this box all of the documents pertaining to my great-grandmother's house - the mortgage note, the deed, and related insurance papers. In order to share these documents with my readers and to further preserve them, I decided to scan them into my computer.

My scanning software offers several options:

• black and white document
• black and white photograph
• color document
• color photograph

Deciding on a scanning method depends on what I want to do with my scan. If I want to scan an exact copy of the document as it looks to MY eye, then I probably want to scan in color in order to preserve the appearance of the aged and faded paper. However, this scanned copy does not make for a very good template to print copies from. Printing copies with a colored background, even if it is off white, will use up a lot of your ink. So it is a good idea to also scan each item in black and white, especially if you ever plan to print copies of it.

This is the deed of trust scanned in color. If I were to print from these scans, the printer would print a beige color to the entire page. Although this scan is nice because it represents the true color and original appearance of the document, it does not make for a good copy to print from. Also, the top image was scanned as a color document and the bottom image was scanned as a color photograph. The photograph picked up the text from the other side of the page which is not good.

The other option is document versus photograph. Scanning as a photograph would also help to preserve the original appearance of the aged paper, however, it will pick up a lot more of the paper's blips and blemishes, including bleed through of text from the other side. You can reduce the amount of bleed through by placing a piece of black card stock on top of the paper being scanned. Or you can scan as a document and get a much clearer and crisp scan. Sometimes the typed text might not show up as dark with the document setting as it would with the photograph setting, but this can be adjusted in your graphics program using your brightness, contrast, and gamma controls.

On the left is a document scanned as a black and white document - as you can see the text is pretty light. The one on the right is the same scan with gamma correction applied - now the text is much darker. Click the image to view a larger image. 

Regardless of the scanning option you decide on, you should always check your scans to make sure everything shows up nicely - especially anything that was written in pencil.

Also, with regard to resolution, always scan in either 300 or 600 dpi resolution. To me, the biggest advantage is readability. If I need to zoom in to a document in order to decipher its handwriting, I can do so easily with a 300 or 600 dpi scan and still see a clear and crisp image. If I zoomed in on an image that was scanned at 100 dpi resolution, the image would be grainy and the handwriting or text unreadable.

It is best to save your images in both JPG and TIF files types. The TIF files types can be used for preservation purposes and as in the example above, TIF files can be easily zoomed and still maintain their clarity of text and handwriting. Saving images in JPG files is also a good idea, especially if you plan to publish the images on the web, on your online tree, or email to cousins. Most photo and document upload services have a maximum file upload size that can only be adhered to in a JPG format. My scanning software also allows me to save my images into either individual or multiple page PDF files. I often use this to my advantage: PDFs can be easily emailed to cousins, they offer a nice way to keep multiple pages of the same document together, and the text is often searchable (mine is!).

How do you scan your documents and does it differ from scanning photographs?

Looking for Agee Ancestors - Building my Match Trees

In my last post about the Smith and Agee family, I discussed how I was able to connect my Smith family to the family of Thomas Smith and Leah Agee of Tennessee and Kentucky. By running a targeted surname search through my DNA matches for the Agee surname, I was able to determine that my family was connected to Mathieu Agee, the Huguenot who fled from France and moved to Virginia around 1700. Mathieu was the grandfather of Leah Agee who married Thomas Smith. Two descendants of Thomas Smith and Leah Agee have had their Y-DNA tested and they were a match to my grandfather, Darrel. The results of the Y-DNA test combined with the autosomal DNA test have led me to believe that Thomas Smith and Leah Agee were the common ancestors of my Grandfather and his two Y-DNA matches. My goal is to determine exactly how my Smith ancestors tie in to the family of Thomas Smith and Leah Agee.

I started off by entering all of the information I learned from my AncestryDNA matches. I entered all 11 of my matches' direct line ancestors into my Family Tree Maker software, starting with themselves and going back to their Agee ancestors. As I entered their direct line ancestors, I added a citation pointing back to their online trees to every name and fact I copied from their tree to mine. This is what my citations look like:

Citation Title: Public Member Tree Submitted by 5haags
Citation Detail: "Rapp/Knutson Family Tree," submitted by 5haags, accessed 02 February 2015; AncestryDNA match to Ginger Smith. Possible Common ancestor is Mathieu Agee.
Citation Text: This is where I enter the ancestor's name, place and date of birth and death and any other information pertaining to the data being cited.
Web Address: http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/18580720

The full citation is as follows: "Rapp/Knutson Family Tree," submitted by 5haags, accessed 02 February 2015; AncestryDNA match to Ginger Smith. Possible Common ancestor is Mathieu Agee. http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/18580720.

Next time I will run a targeted surname search for the Agee surname in my ftDNA matches and also I will do the same for my Smith family members who have tested with ftDNA.

Posts related to this topic:
Looking for Connection to Agee ancestors via Autosomal DNA
Running a Targeted Surname Search in my Smith Relatives' Results

Louise's Lost Files - Cancelled Checks

This is part of my Louise's Lost Files Series in which I share with my readers some of the items I am inventorying, scanning and posting that came from my great-grandmother, Louise Lasiter's house in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Last week I sifted through the two small drawers of paperwork belonging to my great-grandmother. They contained basic household mail items such as bank statements, bills, and tax statements. Almost everything was in their original envelops. The bank statements were from the two years prior to her death: 1995-1997. Inside the envelops containing the bank statements were also her cancelled checks. Among the cancelled checks I found this one:

It was addressed to me. My great-grandmother had sent me this check in 1995 when I was in my 2nd year of college in Burlington, Vermont. It was very nice of her to remember me.

This check is significant not only because it had been addressed to me, but also because it contains valuable genealogical information.

• It contains my great-grandmother's address
• It has my great-grandmother's Signature on it
• It has my name on it
• It has my signature on the back of the check along with the name of the bank I used in Burlington, VT (and the date it was cashed by me)
• It also has the name of the bank my great-grandmother used

I think the signatures are the big things that interest most genealogists. How many of your ancestors' signatures do you have?

The rest of the genealogically relevant information gleaned from this cancelled check ties in to the lives of both myself and my great-grandmother. It goes beyond just the genealogical facts that we are first interested in. It helps to build a picture of what life was like for those involved. 

So my tip of the day is, don't throw away things just because they don't tell you when someone was born, died, or married. Some day, this document might be the one piece of evidence you need to prove something! 

Louise's Lost Files - Week 1 - The Inventory Process

This is the first of my posts outlining the inventorying process of my great-grandmother, Louise Lasiter's files. Louise Benson Lasiter was born January 1st, 1912 in Avant, Osage Co., Oklahoma and died December 27th, 1997 in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I came into possession of some of her files and photos last December while visiting Fort Smith. I have outlined the inventory process I am using while going through her files below:

For my first project, I tackled the two-drawer paper box (the smallest of the 3 boxes).

It wasn't that full and the items inside were mostly papers (and not photographs). All of these papers were folded and some were even enclosed in their original envelops.

I started by pulling one stack of papers out of the first drawer.

I looked at each item, one at a time, taking it out of its envelop.

I wrote down what the item was, who it pertained to, and the date in my lined notebook.

I then put the item back into its original envelop, indicating on my sheet if it came in an original envelop.

Once I filled up one page of my notebook, I bundled those items on the first page and put a rubber band around them; then I put a sticky note on the first item with the number corresponding with the notebook page.

If I found something interesting in the stack, I put a sticky note on the item so that it sticks out of the pile. I also put a sticky note on the first item of the stack to indicate there is something of relevance within the pile. I also put a big star beside the item in the inventory list

In this bunch of papers, I found several documents of interest - the marriage certificate of my great-grandparents, the deed to their house, an old deed to some cattle that was sold in the 1800s, and my great-grandmother's cancelled checks. I thought these items were significant, so I put a star beside their entries in my inventory list. 

When I finished going through the two file drawers, I had accumulated four bundles. I then placed the banded bundles into a numbered oversized photo box.

Later, when I'm ready to start writing about and sharing these documents, all I have to do is consult my inventory list to see what bundle it was placed in, then pull that bundle out of the photo box and retrieve the document.