Restoring Family Photos Seminar

The Restoring Your Photos seminar by Dennis Allen and Cris Nagla focused on the use of the Paint program to touch up photos. Suggestions included copying areas of the same color to overlay missing parts and using the  pencil tool to fill in defects.  Always work with a copy of your scan and save frequently.  That way you can return to an earlier point if you don't like some of what you have changed.  They had examples of what they have done with pictures and showed the steps used for some of them.

They also had some additional useful suggestions for dealing with photos.  You can scan slides on a scanner not equipped for slides by leaving the scanner lid up and providing plenty of overhead light.  They demonstrated how to deal with rolled pictures that are too brittle to unroll.  Using a spacesaver bag and a vaporizor to add moisture, the photo gradually becomes more flexible.  They recommend adding vapor, zipping the bag shut for four hours, and repeating every four hours for about three days to get the picture where it can be put ounder a book to hold it flat.

Preserving Your History Workshop - From March 2009

The French Icarian Colony Foundation sponsored a workshop by Tanya Zanish-Belcher, the head of the ISU Library Special Collections Department. The topic, Preserving Your History, was originally for preservation of family papers; but, was of interest to historical societies and other groups. It covered proper storage for long-term preservation, deciding what to save, and some of the mechanics of indexing and storage for use. It was a well attended, interesting, and very useful session.

Reference materials included copies of two technical leaflets from the ISU Library Special Collections Department:

• Saving Our History Through Photographs
• Preserving Your Family's Papers

and some of the forms they use. Books recommended included Starting an Archives by Elizabeth Yakel and Describing archives: a content standard by Steven L. Hensen

Sources of archival materials mentioned included:

• Gaylord Brothers
  
• Light Impressions
• Conservation Resources
• Hollinger Metal Edge
• University Products

Also, Tanya has an earlier review of the topic highlighting online sources at Archives and Special Collections: A Guide to Resources on the Web, C&RL News, March, 2003, Vol. 64, No. 3.

Where Our Visitors Come From

While most of the visitors to our website come from nearby, especially Story County, Iowa, we occasionally have visitors from farther away. We have had visitors from the UK and recently had our first visitor from Norway, from the town of Bergen.

Publishing on a CD

Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter has an item on publishing cemetery transcriptions on a CD as a PDF. See also the comments about the proper way of doing cemetery transcriptions.

The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com.

Grand Traverse County, Michigan Cemetery Transcriptions CD

The Grand Traverse Area Genealogical Society Cemetery Committee is about to launch their latest CD-ROM disk of cemetery transcriptions. The new disk covers the 26 rural cemeteries of Grand Traverse County although the three Oakwood Cemeteries will be released later on a separate disk (that will require another CD due to the size of the data).

This CD represents about four years of work by the society. It will be published in PDF format which can be read by Adobe Acrobat on Windows or on Macintosh systems by either Preview or by Adobe Acrobat. (Those are all free programs.) The CD will sell for $35.00 plus $3.00 for shipping and handling to U.S. addresses.

You can reserve a copy of this CD by sending an email to Kfarley40@charter.net. Send no money at this time; you will be asked for payment later.

Added note: Further information was later published in the Leelanau Enterprise.

Tools Used to Create Our Website

Our CHA-Notes website was created by using the following tools. These are all currently free tools that can be used by creating an account, in our case generally the cambridgehistoricalassociation account.

• Blogger is the service used to create the blog. For this a Google Account which includes Gmail is needed.
• Google Analytics is used to track usage of our website.
• PBwiki is a wiki service where I've created the Cambridge Historical Association Wiki as a wiki that only we can edit and everyone can see. This is where the expanded table of contents are created and stored.
• Scribd is a separate service where documents can be stored. This is where PDFs of the newsletter are stored.
• Picasa is a photo-storage service from Google. Pictures for the blog are automatically stored there in an album associated with the blog.
• Google Alerts is a service that provides regular updates on search topics. It emails new results from searches of blogs, news, or the web to you either once a day, once a week, or as it happens. I have searches for Cambridge Iowa and for historical societies or associations that sometimes have items useful for the web site or as examples.

Expanded Table of Contents for Second Book Underway

The expanded table of contents for our second book, Cambridge, Iowa 150 Years of Education in Cambridge and Union Township, Story County, Iowa has been started. You can follow its growth on our wiki. There will be a link to it on our regular website when it is further along.

This is similar to the one we created for our first book.

[Update July 26: The expanded TOC is completed and a link will be on our regular website shortly.]

Website Statistics

It finally dawned on me that this would be a good place to keep the statistics on the visitors to our website. This way they can be available to the group without needing to look back at the monthly meeting minutes. Recent usage of CHA Notes has been:

September 19 - October 19 2008 19 Visits 16 Absolute Unique Visitors 29 Pageviews

August 16 - September 15 2008 18 Visits 14 Absolute Unique Visitors 30 Pageviews

July 19 - August 18 2008 23 Visits 19 Absolute Unique Visitors 37 Pageviews

June 14 - July 14 2008 20 Visits 16 Absolute Unique Visitors 50 Pageviews

May 16 - June 15 2008 27 Visits 22 Absolute Unique Visitors 59 Pageviews

April 17 - May 17 2008 25 Visits 20 Absolute Unique Visitors 45 Pageviews

April 7 - May 7 2008 21 Visits 14 Absolute Unique Visitors 43 Pageviews

Notes: Google Analytics provide a running 30-day summary of usage showing visits, unique visitors, and pageviews. Statistics beyond 30 days ago are not available unless previously downloaded. It also shows how visitors reached the site (directly, by referral (following a link) or by searching) and where the link originated (the Cambridge, Iowa website has been our main source). Google had some system difficulties from April 30 to May 5 that meant data for that time was lost.

For comparison, CHA Project Notes had:

August 16 - September 15 2008 3 Visits 3 Absolute Unique Visitors 4 Pageviews

July 18 - August 17 2008 5 Visits 3 Absolute Unique Visitors 9 Pageviews

June 14 - July 14 2008 8 Visits 7 Absolute Unique Visitors 8 Pageviews