November Ruminations

Because I'm focused on Blurb bookmaking these days, my ruminations this month are a bit of a continuation from something I mentioned in last month's ruminations: digital photo archiving. And again, my thoughts are not quite in sync with the how-to methods you've read about from the experts.

Digital archiving as advised by the experts consists of scanning photos at 300 dpi and saving them as TIF files. An important pro of the TIF format is that it is not a 'lossy' format; in other words, no resampling of the pixels takes place if you should 'Save' the file over and over again. A TIF con is that the file size is considerably larger than that of the same photo scan saved in, say, the JPG format.

The experts' advice may be enough for you, as far as it goes. However, in the course of working on a book about my mother's childhood, I discovered that I was unable to use some photos as I wanted to. Why?

For an 8" x 10" book, the pixel dimensions for a full-bleed page image, such as the left side of the two-page spread above, are 2363 x 3000 pixels. I had previously scanned both of the snapshots above at 300 dpi, but a regular-sized snapshot scanned at 300 dpi is simply not adequate to enlarge that much.

Using small snapshots as full-bleed page images, as shown in the examples above, necessitated my finding the originals and rescanning them at considerably higher resolution. In most cases, 600-700 dpi was adequate, but in some cases I scanned as high as 1200 dpi in order to crop the photo as I wanted it, or to select some small detail to enlarge for closer study.

Fortunately, I do have access to most of my mom's old snapshots. There are many other photos in my digital collection, however, which I've scanned from photos which I no longer have access to. I hadn't foreseen that I would have need of higher-resolution images.

In the future, I plan to scan small photos and snapshots at a much higher resolution. Because saving them as TIF files would require an enormous amount of disk space, I'll save them as JPG files. When I open one of those files for use in a project, I'll make a copy to work on and then close the original file without using the Save command. That way, the pixels in the original file do not get resampled as they do when you Save. It's the resampling that causes a tiny loss of clarity every time you do it, unnoticeable at first but after Saving repeatedly, the degradation becomes noticeable. At least, that's my understanding from a number of articles I've read about digital images.

By the way, if you burn your photo files to a CD or DVD, a JPG file is not going to degrade any more than a TIF file. The only degradation would be that of the CD or DVD itself.

I find that every time I use a photo in a project, my needs are different--I may want to crop it differently, or change the color to sepia or some other tint, or maybe just desaturate the colors a bit, maybe erase the background... you just never know what your next idea might be. Consequently I always work on a copy anyway, rather than the original image.

My point, if I actually have one, is that you may want to consider what your purpose is in scanning old photographs, and how you might want to use the scans in the future. You may need to make some exceptions to the advice of the experts in order to serve your own needs better.

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November Accomplishments

• I managed to get a post up for Bill West's Second Great Local Poem and Song Genealogy Challenge. I've been waiting all year for that one to come around, and almost missed it due to seemingly endless fussing over the finishing of the book I've been working on.
• I'm sure you're tired of hearing about it but at last, with six hours to spare before the deadline, I uploaded my first family-history-related book to Blurb.com and placed my order.

And in the other column . . .

• There are still a few names remaining to be done on my Surnames page. This is a fine example of how I lose my momentum on a project if I take a break from it before it's completed. I'll finish them up eventually, but right now they're down some on my list of priorities. Sure would be nice if I could wrap that up before the end of the year, though!

A Poem by John Cotton

IN PRAISE OF MASTER STONE.
[To my Reverend Dear Brother, Mr. Samuel Stone, Teacher of the Church at Hartford. 1652.]

How well, dear Brother, art thou called Stone?
As sometimes Christ did Simon Cephas own.
A Stone for solid firmness fit to rear
A part in Zion's wall, and it upbear.
Like Stone of Bohan, bounds fit to describe
'Twixt Church and Church, as that 'twixt tribe and tribe.
Like Samuel's Stone, erst Eben-Ezer hight,
To tell the Lord hath helped us with his might.
Like Stone in David's sling, the head to wound
Of that huge Giant-Church, so far renowned,
Hight the Church Catholic œcumenical,
Or at the lowest compass National;
Yet Politic Visible, and of such a fashion
As may or rule a world or rule a nation.
Which though it be cried up unto the Skies
By Philistines and Israelites likewise,
Yet seems to me to be too near akin
Unto the Kingdom of the Man of sin.
In frame, and state, and constitution,
Like to the first beast in the Revelation
Which was as large as Roman empire wide,
And ruled Rome, and all the world beside.
Go on, good Brother, gird thy sword with might,
Fight the Lord's battles, plead his Church's right.
To Brother Hooker thou art next akin,
By office-right thou must his pledge redeem.
Take thou the double portion of his spirit,
Run on his race, and then his crown inherit.
Now is the time when Church is militant,
Time hast'neth fast when it shall be triumphant.

The Reverend Samuel Stone was my ninth great-grandfather.

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Stop by West in New England on November 25th, Thanksgiving day, when the entries in Bill West's Second Great American Local Poem And Song Genealogy Challenge will be posted. I've read a few of the entries already, and this year's event promises to be as awesome as last year's.

Treasure Chest Thursday: The One That Got Away

Okay, so this was not an ancestral treasure... it was mine. I held it in my hand every day for decades. It was on my keyring from the time I got it until early 2004 when it disappeared, keys and all. I didn't care about the keys, but I still miss my brass tag. I expected to have it until my dying day. And maybe beyond!

You're wondering how I got a picture of it if it's gone? Well, I was still grieving my lost tag in late 2005 so, to make myself feel better, I decided to recreate it in Paint Shop Pro and then add it to a digital scrapbook page as an embellishment. When I sat down to do that, however, I found myself with questions. Like, what did it actually say?

You've come a long way, baby.
or
you've come a long way baby
or
YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY

And where was the line-break? Details, details! It's funny how we can look at stuff every day for years and still not fully see it. I thought to google it, hoping to find an image online or maybe even an identical tag for sale on ebay. Instead I found a journal entry by a college student named Violette, in which she mentioned that she'd received a tag like mine as a gift from a friend. Next I googled her name and found a way to contact her, so I wrote and told her a bit of history about the tag. It was a promotional item from the late 1960s or early '70s (surely before she was born) that came with a purchase of Virginia Slims cigarettes.

And I told her the story of how I'd lost my tag. I'd gone out for an early morning walk around the apartment complex. I'd stopped at my minivan for a moment before taking my trash to the compactor at the far side of the complex, and either I left my keys hanging in the car lock or else had them in hand when I got to the garbage compactor and unwittingly dropped them in when I tossed the trash. Of course, back at my apartment, I noticed their absence right away since I couldn't get in! I immediately retraced my steps, but to no avail. The keys were not hanging from the minivan gate, they weren't inside the minivan, and searching as much as I could reach in the trash compactor produced nothing. Because the compactor operated automatically, I could not climb in and search there more thoroughly unless it was turned off, so I found the man in charge of maintenance and he offered to send the groundskeeper at 8 a.m. when he started work. I returned to the compactor about 7:55 to await the groundskeeper, but he'd arrived early and was already standing in the compactor ripping open all the bags of garbage that were in there and dumping them out! Of course, my keys wouldn't have been in a bag, they would have fallen down between bags to the bottom of the compactor. But now, with all the garbage set free, it was a hopeless cause.

And then I asked Violette to help me with my three questions:

1. Was the phrase entirely in lower case letters or upper case, or was the first word capitalized?
2. Was there a period at the end of the phrase?
3. As I recalled, the phrase was broken into two lines, correct? Where was the line break?

She graciously replied with a friendly letter, telling me a little about herself. She was from Switzerland, attending college in Michigan for awhile. It made me smile to think that her friend had given her a tag like mine--quite appropriate for her! She answered my questions about the tag, and with her answers, I made the image above. Then I emailed it to her and asked if I'd gotten it about right.

A short time later during a break from school, she emailed me back. Yes, she said, I'd gotten it quite right except for the font. She'd been able to make a scan of her tag for me and sent it along. I've used it in the image below. Mine was pretty close, eh?

July 2006: I'm reflected in the side window of my
minivan. I was still living in Oregon at the time, but
this picture was taken at my dad's house in Michigan.

Violette has become part of the memory of my tag now. I googled her again while preparing this post. It appears she's travelled a good bit in these last five years. It still makes me smile, to think of her with a keytag that says, "You've come a long way, baby." It's so right for her! In 2006, she wrote a beautiful essay that will have you nodding and smiling too. Click to read "Big is beautiful."

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And while we're on the subject . . .

Speaking of Virginia Slims, I found this fun little collection of "long way, baby" commercials at Internet Archive. Oddly, the last minute of the video is blank. Consider it a moment of silence for women who have lost their lives to cancer and emphysema from smoking.

Today is The Great American Smokeout. Every year at this time, I take a moment to thank myself for quitting smoking. At the time, I had no idea how much it would change my life.