Scanning and Preservation - The GW Smith Albums

My grandfather, George Washington Smith, and his camera.
I think the sling on his right arm is to help keep the camera steady.
I wonder how much it weighed?

As I mentioned in my last post, the main focus of my scanning and preservation this year have been three photo albums that belonged to my grandfather, with photos taken from 1911-1919.

These photos were among the first things I scanned when I began my genealogy journey, but I wasn't happy with the job that I did and after last year's discovery that a local archive has some pretty poor quality copies of some of these photos, I decided that I would rescan the albums for myself, my cousins and to share with the Eastern Townships Resource Centre in Quebec.

Finally, the albums are rescanned ✔

I created an index in Excel as I went along ✔

I uploaded the scans and index to Dropbox ✔

I put archival tissue paper between the pages of each album and to fill the empty spaces in the temporary acid-free box.✔

I emailed the link to the ERTC ✔

To Do:

Order archival boxes for the albums

Finish labeling all of my scans for the Smith family to upload to Dropbox and share with family

I should also mention that I confirmed during my visit to this archive last September that they wanted these scans and before I started scanning I checked with the archivist that my scanning method would work for them (600 dpi, .tif format, no color correction, upload to Dropbox). The only thing that Jody asked was that I scan any photos smaller than 2 x 2 inches at 1200 dpi which I was happy to do.

I heard back from Jody after she received my link and she was very happy to have these images and the additional information that I was able to provide for the images already in their collection. As I said in my previous post, I love these photos, but I am so happy that I'm almost done with this project!