11 December 2009

Don't Cut Yourself Short

Out of context is never a good thing.

A couple of quick suggestions based upon my experiences scanning things at the Family History Library while on my annual group trip.


The first image here is from the christening entry of Thomas Frame in Carlisle, England. It shows a mistake not to make while making digital copies: taking ONLY what you want. There is no perspective on this at all. What year is it? The date may be difficult to read, what did the entry right before this one have for a year? What are the headings for? (note, I also made two scans of this record, the other one was done to lighten up the right hand side of the image.)




A better approach is to take a digital scan of the entire page, which is shown in the second image. This helps me to keep track of the actual source and gives me the location and the year of the entry, which is missing in the little snippet I made which only included Thomas' christening.




I also like to make a scan of the "title page" of the film as well after I've made the scans of the records in that series. This helps to keep me organized and know where the information was located.
I typically scan quite a few documents while in Salt Lake and this helps me to remember what is what. Usually what I do while there are "quick lookups" and things can run together very quickly.
Thomas Frame as shown in these posts is my wife's great-great-grandfather.