Cemetery Education

Home from our trip and we are exhausted!  Lots of family time in the sun and tons of driving!  It was a good trip and I accomplished most of my cemetery goals, but I’m not prepared to post about my genealogy research just yet.  However, I thought I’d reflect on what I wish I had brought for my time in the cemeteries.

My preparation was not as thorough as I had hoped to make it.  I was able to make copies of the cemetery transcriptions from the library, so I thought I was good there.  I had intended to go through those lists to highlight stones that were my family line, but I ran out of time and kept thinking that I could do that as we were driving, so I didn’t do that ahead of time.  I wish that I had.

For the trip, our car was packed to the gills including a couple of bags in the center of the back seat – where I rode a great deal of the time.  I never felt like I had the amount of room needed to have my laptop open as well as my binder with the lists, so I did not work on that during the drive.  Since my goal was to photograph every stone in the cemeteries, I didn’t feel that it was vital to have the highlights anyway.  Once again, I wish I had taken the time to do that.

My first cemetery was the Clear Springs Cemetery on Coffey Hill Church Road.  My mother had told me that the last time she was there, in 1965, it was not well kept and pretty overgrown.  So I was pleasantly surprised to find a very nice, well maintained cemetery.  I handed my 14 and 16 year old children each a camera (I had one as well) and gave them each a section of the cemetery to start photographing.  My wonderful husband graciously agreed to drive back to town to get some heavy duty foil and a brush as I could see that my great-grandparents’ stones were going to be hard to read.

When I gave my kids the cameras, I didn’t think that much instruction was needed short of “take a picture of every stone”.  Here’s what I wish I had told them:

• Take a picture of the ENTIRE stone – not just the words.
• Take the picture as straight on as possible.  My 6 foot 2 inch son towered above the stones, so the angle was not great.
• Make sure your shadow does not fall on the stone.

I did slip back the next morning to retake some of the photos, but I would not have done that if I hadn’t needed to run to the store for a few things anyway.  The downside to that was that I went pretty early in the morning and the sun was directly behind some of the stones.

The 2nd cemetery was the Bernard Cemetery, just down the road a bit on Stephens Ridge Road.  The cemetery was slightly smaller and it seemed like just about every stone was brand new!  I’m puzzled by this…is it possible for stones that are 80 years old or more to look like they were just put up?  Would the majority of the stones really be replaced?  I would love to find the history of these cemeteries, but I wouldn’t know where to look.  Perhaps this was one of the cemeteries that was moved when Russell County was building the dam to create Lake Cumberland.  The kids were pretty bored with the whole cemetery thing by then (and it was starting to really warm up!) so they stayed in the car and my husband and I each photographed half of the cemetery.  Again, this cemetery was well maintained and easy to photograph.

The final cemetery was the Square Oak Cemetery.  This is where I really regretted not highlighting the transcriptions.  When we arrived at the cemetery, I could see that at least 100 stones were missing in the “old section” of the cemetery.  All that remained were lumps of cement bases that looked like rocks with an occasional stone here and there. 

It was really sad to see.  What could cause this?  Age?  Flooding?  Vandalism?  Could this be why there were so many new looking stones at Bernard Cemetery?  As I looked at the stones in the newer section, I didn’t see any stones from my family line.  So I went back to the transcriptions and I didn’t see anything from my family.  Why did I choose this cemetery?  I KNOW that I had recently entered some information on a family with several members buried there, but I could not find it in my print outs OR in my database.  The only thing I can figure out is that I must have recently found some death certificates on Ancestry and put it into my database there, but of course, there was no internet service in the cemetery!  If I had highlighted the list before arriving, I would have seen that there were no “surviving” stones for my line there and would have picked a different cemetery.  Some of the missing stones must have been the ones I would have been looking for.  So I decided to take pictures of each of the remaining stones in the old section of the cemetery, even though most of them were virtually unreadable.  I’m hoping that I might be able to play with the photos in Photoshop to see if I can make out a name or two.  Because of the heat, we did not take photos of the stones on the new section.

Overall, I was happy with the cemetery visits.  I wish I had brought along my small hand broom to brush away dead grass from the mowers as well as scissors or clippers to trim around the edges of the stones that were flat on the ground.  Those things, along with the foil and brush will be in my cemetery “tool kit” for the next visit!  Now I just have to get these stones uploaded to Findagrave.com and my mission will be accomplished!  THAT project will be done in bits and pieces as school starts in just 1 week!

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Be Careful What You Wish For…

I admit, I am a photo addict.  Being married for 24 years and having 4 kids has given me TONS of photos for my family scrapbooks and I love it!  I’m always wishing I had more photos of my ancestors.  Part of that wish came true recently with the acquisition of my grandmother’s negatives – but it has just about taken over my life!

First, I just wanted to identify who was in each negative so that I could decide which ones to have printed.  Then, I wanted to make them clear enough to be digital images on my computer without printing anything.  That lead to days of trying different methods of taking digital photos of the negatives and then inverting the colors.  Then, I began to search for online PhotoShop tutorials to help me make the images better.  Then, I bought a light box, which made the images MUCH better – which means I’d like to take all of the pictures AGAIN!

I decided to put all of the pictures into a PowerPoint program so that they would be easy to show to others on the computer screen and easy to rearrange.  I can also add information I learn in the notes section for each slide until I’m ready to make a final format.  My mother helped with the arranging, so that part wasn’t too bad.  I printed out a 60 page “book” with all of the photos in Notes format – 3 photos to a page.  Because the photos weren’t taken in chronological order, I went through and added the image number under each photo so it would be easier to find on my laptop.  My next project (besides retaking all of the digital photos) will be to add information as I show the book to family members.  What do they remember?  Can they help me narrow down the dates?  Do they have additional photos that they had forgotten about that would be nice to add to the collection – which will all eventually be burned to DVD’s for everyone?

The problem is that while I am loving every minute of this, I am not getting very much new research done!  What happened to all my research goals for the summer?  School will be starting again before I know it and my research time will be drastically reduced!

So while I’m incredibly grateful for these negatives, I’m going to HAVE to force myself to put them away – or at least limit the amount of time I work on them each day – and get back into research mode.  Back on the top of my list?  A trip to Chicago for some Newberry Library research and then a trip to Kentucky to find some cemeteries as well as hidden nuggets from the local library!

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Preserving Ancestor’s Photo Negatives

In my continuing effort to preserve my Grandmother’s negatives, I’ve learned a few things that I thought might be helpful to other genealogists.

When I was first given the negatives, my goal was to find a way to see what was on the negatives in order to see which would be the most useful to have printed.  Because the negatives were not 35mm film, I was having a hard time thinking of an “easy” way to see the negatives.    I could hold the negatives up to the window and because a good portion of the negatives were of photos I’ve seen in family photo albums, I could tell who the subject of those photos were.  I was most interested in the older, black and white negatives.  Some of those negatives were from before my grandparents had children and I was pretty certain that some were of photos that my family has never seen before.

After researching negative scanners and finding none that would scan the format of negatives I was looking at, I decided to try scanning the negatives without any attachment.  I figured that at the very least, the negatives would be larger on my screen and easier to see.  Then, my daughter showed me how to invert the colors on the negatives to see the actual picture.  I was thrilled!  But some of the photos were too scratched to get a good image from.

My grandmother - scanned negative

I could tell that this image was my grandmother as a teenage, and I was incredibly disappointed that this photo did not turn out.  Later that evening, I was sorting the negatives into photo album pages to try to get them organized so that I could quit shuffling them around and damaging them further.  To see the images, I was holding them up to my computer screen with a blank page in Microsoft Word.  I was telling my son about my problems with the negatives and how I thought they’d scan better if I could get light from BEHIND the negative instead of front as the scanner was doing.  I asked him if he thought it would work for me to use my digital camera to take a picture of the negative taped to my computer screen and we decided to give it a try.  What a difference!

Vesper - digital image of the negative

I did a test run of a couple of negatives and then noticed that some of the photos had a pattern imbedded in them.  They almost looked like the photos were taken through a window screen.  I realized that the pattern was the texture of my computer screen!  I gave up for the night, but couldn’t stop thinking about how I could fix this.  I thought I could put a sheet of white paper behind the negative before taking the photo, but I could not find any white paper that was truly white.   The mottled appearance of the paper (only visible when held up to light) made the negatives look dirty and spotted.  So I decided to gently tape the negatives to my window, which worked great for getting rid of the texture, but there was a color variation in the images that I figured out was my camera seeing sky above trees above grass through the negative.  Not something I could notice when looking at the negative on my camera display, but certainly noticeable in the inverted image.  After some trial and error, I ended up stretching a white sheet in front of my window to take care of the background issues.  I used the macro lens on my camera with no flash and was quite happy with the results!  My lens was approximately 2 inches from the negative.

Final version - a little touchup with Photoshop

Here are some other things I learned:

• The sun cannot shine into the window.  It causes some areas of the negative to appear lighter – like the flash was too bright - because the light is not evenly distributed.
• The sheet cannot be rippling at all.  It causes differences in the color that make the negative look dirty.
• One side of the negative is shiny and other other is not.  If the shiny side was facing me, I could see the reflection of the camera and my hands in the image.  The only drawback to this was the all of the images were reversed.  An easy fix in Photoshop.
• I attempted to take photos of the negative through the clear photo album pages I have the negatives stored in to avoid touching them, but again, I had issues with reflections.  I went back to taping the negatives to the window.  I allowed the smallest amount of tape possible to touch the tiniest edge of the negative.
• An overcast day worked best – but I still could not have the sunlight coming into the window.   Instead the light “bounced” off the sheet and was evenly diffused.

So originally, my goal was simply to identify which negatives to have developed and I ended up with over 100 great digital images that are ready to print from my own photo printer!  Many negatives were not scanned because I could tell they would not be useful in the lines I am researching (alot of my uncle’s buddies in  the Navy), but I can always go back and get them later if needed.  And I did not even try to work with the color negatives.  Perhaps this winter when everything outside is already white!

With my digital negatives, I can zoom in on faces or crop the photo to be any convenient size, insert them into notes or family tree charts – all for free!  The bonus is that the negatives are digitally and physically preserved with the digital copies stored in various places.  My family will all be getting a CD burned with all of the final images – which I hope will bring out lots of forgotten family stories and mementos to be shared at the next family reunion.  I plan to include a list of items that THEY may not think is helpful to my research, but that I’d love to see!

And to think, this all started with my Uncle telling me, “I really don’t have that much for your genealogy project”!

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