Musings of a Genealogy-Nut

Well, it is at The Digital Scrapbook Place.  For some reason the long time family history chats have been attended less and less.  Not so the chats based on Family History this month.  It is amazing how much knowledge is out there.  I feel as if there was no way to share it with so many.  How to start, what to do with your information, how to organize your pages, where to go to find more.  Sometimes it is hard to remember who is supposed to be leading the chats as everyone has so much to share.

Right now the Family History Chats are on Tuesdays at 8 PM EST and Thursdays at 10 PM EST.  Somehow, the other chats all week long end up centering on Family History, too. 

There is an awesome tutorial on "Restoring and Tinting a Badly Faded Photo for Advanced Photoshop Users" by Carole Harden.  I printed that out immediately and set to work.  Here are two of my results.

  Another topic has been what to do if you don't have photos.  Here are a couple of my solutions.

I never knew any of my great-grandparents but I felt closer to Anna and Greeley Scarlett than the others.  The Scarlett line of first-born sons came down to Greeley since the early 1700s.  However, he and Anna had two girls.  Minnie was 8 years old when her little sister, Katie, my grandmother, came along.  Minnie married first, of course, and had one child, a son, Clair.  When Katie married, she had one child, a son, my father, Clifford.  Clair never married but Cliff did and had two children, my brother, Charles and me.

Anna and Greeley moved from Alvordton to Hicksville (both in Ohio) next door to their older daughter.

I loose track of them there.  Minnie and her husband died.  In the early 60s, Clair died and I went to his military funeral.  I was sure the cemetery wasn't far from the house.

My friend, Theresa, mentioned in a geneology - scrapbooking chat one night that she lived quite close to Hicksville, Ohio and would check the cemetery there for me.

She sent me photos of the headstones.

Anna Scarlett 1859 - 1931

Horace G. Scarlett  1852 - 1933

The Garver Scarlett Plot

The three close stones are the Garvers, Minnie, Will and their son Clair.  The two further ones are the Scarlett stones.

This week I received notice from Ancestry.com that someone had sent me a message.  What a surprise.

At this point it looks like my great-great-grandmother, Rachel Marker, had a baby out of wedlock while living in Sumerset County, Pennsylvania where she was born in 1834. 

There are some discrepancies.

RACHEL JANE MARKER SCARLETT WINEBRENNER
Born  03 Aug 1834 Somerset, Pennsylvania
Emigrated to Noble County, Indiana in 1843 with parents and brothers age 9 (lied in obituary?)
Birth of Henry Swarner in 1848 in Somerset, Pennsylvania (She would be just 14.  Did she return to Sumerset from Noble County or was the story in the obit a cover-up?)
Marriage to Horace Greeley Scarlett 19 Jan 1852
Birth of Almon Scarlett 16 Nov 1853
Horace G Scarlett died  25 Mar 1856
Almon renamed Horace Greeley after his father
Marriage to Jacob Winebrenner (next door neighbor) 15 Jan 1857
Births of 6 Winebrenner children 1857 to 1869
Rachel's death 14 Sept 1906 (age 72)

Jacob Winebrenner and Rachel Jane Marker Scarlett Winebrenner

Rachel's obituary.  Part lost.

A couple of days ago I read a message in a forum; a forum of scrapbooking friends...not even about genealogy.  This friend was complaining about how she had spent countless hours and a lot of money researching her family's genealogy.  A cousin, then published HER tree, and it was full of errors, undocumented links lifted from other trees, and no proofs.

My friend hit a nerve.  I go to several sites that archive trees of the members and allow sharing, notifying you when there are matches.  It is so easy to just grab those new branches on the trees, and if there is no proofs, oh, well.

Now I have started searching for discrepancies in my lines and found some "impossible" links.  My favorite multiple mistakes are women linked as mothers to children born after their death date.  In one case a man was over 100 years older than his child.

I am unsure whether to try and clean up my tree, or just start over.  Maybe I will do both...a carefully documented tree from scratch, but keep the old tree for reference.

WHERE I'M FROM 

I am from WWII, from Ration Stamps, and Oleo.
I am from the smell of lake water and wood boats.
I am from the bed of zinnias and marigolds, the pungent scent and sticky, fuzzy leaves.
I am from Family Sunday dinners and tolerance of peculiarities, from Grandma and Grandpa and Scarlett pride.
I am from the orderliness and tradition-keeping.
From old-time Indiana songs and colorful expressions.
I am from Episcopal and Baptist traditions,  The Bible and wine communion.
I'm from Germany, Sweden and England. Garlic and sauerkraut.
From the Indiana farm and large families, the Uncle who fought in WWI, and the  Uncle who was left behind.
I am from boxes of photos, notebooks of census papers, Lifebooks and heritage scrapbooks; Online family trees and newly found relatives.




(This was a challenge from Gene-Musings)

My friend, Fran, wrote this tutorial about her awesome restorations of photos that are aged, damaged and discolored.  She used Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 5, but it will work with other versions.


Here is the original and restored photo;



So here is my hot tip. Whenever I am working on something that I know is going to have a gazillion layers, every time I get about 100 layers I save my work as Restore 1. Then I merge all my layers, duplicate the background layer, and name the project Restore 2. When restore 2 gets to 100 layers I save --> merge --> duplicate the background layer and name it Restore 3.....is just as important as the tutorial. When you are trying to restore a damaged photo the work becomes very intricate and it is SO much easier if you allow yourself to drown in layers.

When trying to restore a photo the very first thing you have to deal with is the tone, color, and noise. Once you deal with those three things much of the detail that you could see in the original photo will disappear. (Which is quite frustrating). In Essee's photo, decreasing the noise in the photo made the hair on the sides of both ladies heads disappear. It also made the right eyebrows of all three people disappear. I used the smudge tool to recreate those areas.
My next step is to work on the faces. If I cannot make the faces look descent, there is no point in wasting my time on the clothes.

HOW I RESTORE FACES:

I paint the faces (use a very soft brush at a very low setting and layer your color) of the people to get rid of the noise that is left behind after the noise filter(every time you use a new color, make a new layer)-->

then I stamp the image (shift+control+alt+E)-->

I put the original on top, but the stamped layer is active -->

I use the lasso tool and, while looking at the original, I work on the stamped layer. On my active layer I select the areas of skin on the face where there are obvious shadows on the original -->

I use a feather of 7-10 to feather the edges and then I copy and paste the selected areas onto a new layer -->

I do a curves adjustment on the extracted areas so that my painted/stamped layer has the shadows and highlights of the original.

Sometimes I have to do this step several times before I am satisfied with the look.

I stamp again, then duplicate --->

I run the duplicated layer through all the blending modes to see if it will improve the detail ---> I find that soft light is usually the blending mode that works the best --> then I mask that layer and paint on the mask until I get a look that I like.

[I use the Imagnomic noise filter. I love it].

In Essee's photo the clothes were very black, so I had to lift the shadows (image --> adjustments-->shadows and highlights) to bring out the detail in the clothes. Lifting shadows always creates horrific problems with noise. Noise is a scary monster that hides in the shadows of our photos. I handled this by hand painting over the noisy areas just like I did the faces. Then, in order to bring out even more detail to the lines of the clothes, I extracted them and added a small drop shadow to things like lapels, and on the outside edge I add a small black outer glow and changed the blend mode to multiply.

I found these great planning pages at Levenger.  I believe they no longer produce this exact paper.  I bought it at a discount, in 5 colors and white and loose.  They now have similar in pads (link above).  I didn't know what I wanted the paper for when I bought it but this seems to be the perfect use.
 I also use this paper for planning a lifebook.  Each section is labeled with the lifebook theme of that week.  Instead of photos, I sketch in the design I want for the page and info on the lined portion.