Musings of a Genealogy-Nut

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.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 1, I will be hanging out in the Ancestorville chat room on Facebook hoping there are some other Ancesterville residents interested in heritage scrapping.  If you are on Facebook, contact me and I will direct you to one of the two chats at 3:00 EST and 8:00 EST.

I was in the chat room at Ancestorville one evening on another topic when I mentioned scrapping heritage, genealogy, ancestors, etc.  There were a couple who didn't know what "scrapping" was, let alone heritage scrapping, digital or otherwise.  There were a couple more who knew about scrapping but hadn't linked it to the stories of the ancestors.  I know at least one who has already jumped into it and keeps me informed.  I don't know all the answers, even if the "Mayor" of Ancestorville called me an "expert" but I have links...lots of links.

My suggestion for getting your feet wet is to choose one photo, piece of ephemera, or copy of an important record, scan it, place it loosely on a blank page and tell the story...every detail you know.  I usually type mine on a computer but handwritten is even better.  THEN go looking for backgrounds and decorations.

My partner and his sister

Then and Now pages are fun to do if you have the photos.  Sometimes it is a bit of serendipity to find a pair of photos like these, and sometimes you have to set up the "Now" photo.  There is always Photoshop if you need to do some fancy cutting and pasting.  I was lucky to find this "now" shot but it was a group shot so other people had to be removed by the magic of Photoshop.

My mother with her older brother, my oldest uncle.

Special occasions are great for that little push you might need to tell a particular story.  My mother often talked about her big brother and the anxious times her family had during WWI when he was away fighting.  I am so glad she told me so many stories. 

It amazes me how little my own children absorb of things I tell them so getting the stories and photos together on these pages might help the old stories live on.  It makes up for not having enough time to talk to my children with their busy lives. 

It never ends, but if it did what would we have to do?  I was unable to sleep the other night and decided to find out a bit about my late-ex-husband's grandmother.  I had met her in Savannah in a nursing home while we were on our honeymoon.  She thought her grandson was her son but on genealogy she was quite clear.  She was Mary Mozelle Bourquin.  Family Tree Maker and Ancestry.com to the rescue.  FTM is alsolinked to Genealogy.com and I have a membership so I didn't think a thing of it when her name came up in a Genealogy page in a book The Bourquin Family.  I copied it all down by hand, at least what was important at the moment.  Her birth date, (she was still alive when this book was done in 1936), dates of all of her children, their spouses, and their dates, and number of children as of 1936.  I also had her parents' names and dates.

It was really late by then and I was tired.  I skipped to the first page of the book and copied down the first entry, Jean Baptiste Bourquin, his birth date, that he was a physician, and immigration from Switzerland to South Carolina in 1738. 

Then I went to bed.  Now I cannot get back to that book any way.  I may have to call the Gen Center in Salt Lake City.  I cannot figure out why it doesn't show up any more.