Recording images in a flat excel file for future reference was one of the tools that I set up as soon as I purchased my first digital camera. I have used my husband's digital cameras through the year but when we were going to Salt Lake City in the fall of 2008, I decided that I needed to own a good digital camera and bought a 10 pixel Canon which worked very well for me. It was a learning curve though in terms of photographing documents and some of the ones that I took are blurry. When we go to Salt Lake City there are a few that I will redo although they now have the ability to download to a memory stick which would actually be preferable. However, the camera is still a good standby visiting Archives that are not so equipped.
My file is simply set up with just the image number, the place where I actually took the picture, what is on the image and this doesn't have to be too exhaustive in terms of detail I have found. I want to be able to search the file and find any references to particular families so the details tend to include the family surname that is most prominent in that regard. With many thousands of images now of genealogical records I need to be able to pull them out quickly to look out and not spend hours finding them. A real gem I found at Allen County Public Library this time was the Protestation Returns for Wiltshire (partial) that I photographed. My fingers are itching to get at them one of these time. With many family lines from particular areas that stretch back into the 1600s the Protestation Returns are a must to help me see who was there and over eighteen at that time.
I copied all the frontispieces of the Blake books at the Allen County Public Library and will share that information on one of the Blake Newsletters in the near future. I want to mention that Somersby is not to be trusted in terms of Blake descent.
I can see now that I have all the images entered in from The Allen County Public Library and The Connecticut State Archives (mostly Blake) that I have a huge chore in front of me working on this material. I will save the parts that pertain to families other than Blake for their particular assigned day.
I also completed the Siderfin material and there are over 300 MB of documents to burn to a CD and send in to the Guild Archives and to the new One Name Study Co-ordinator. I shall get that done early next week and hopefully mailed off soon. Again this family will have their own special day so I will not do anything with the material until that day. I could see that I have some information to add into my charts.
My only non-Blake project is the Pincombe family where I am still the one name study co-ordinator although would also give that up to someone in England if they wished to take it on. As it stands, it needs someone who can travel about to the various archives looking up items in order to pursue this family further. I will continue inputting the older study into Legacy as I have only four of the 16 charts done. It is a massive effort as I need to check each marriage since the charts were mostly prepared by word of mouth and collecting people's transcribed information.
It is nice though concentrating on my two family lines (Blake - my father and Pincombe - my mother). I am hoping that one day someone will take over Lambden as I have not accomplished hardly anything at all on this family. I had not realized it would be such a large family when I took it on as the records spelled our line as Lambsden which is a very very small grouping.
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