Meeting & Events Schedule
Internet Sites & Goodies
Otto Horz dissertation and Pronold Family History
Steering Committee Meeting Oct 11 2003
Using the Internet to Communicate
Sep 13, 2003 Working with Digital Images

Birth, Marriage, Death certificates weren't the only documents that our ancestors left us. We will be discussing a wide range of documents, where to find them and how to use them. Join us to find out how you can use documents to tell your ancestors' stories and write your family history. This meeting is open to everybody interested in history or genealogy.

Dr. Wolfgang Grams will be giving a presentation on this very interesting topic. It will be held at theVandeberg Auditorium at the Pyle Center. I am planning on being there.

A little bird told me that John Colletta will be the featured speaker. He is a great speaker. Be sure to mark your calendar for this event.

The speaker will be Roger Minert. He spoke a couple of years ago and was phenomenal.
Another item to put on your calendar.

This a real geeky program and it can be tough to understand what a gem it is. Trust me. This program is the greatest thing since sliced bread. First off it is free. What is the problem we are trying to solve? The biggest problem you have with old photos is that you have know idea about who is in the picture, what was the event and when was it taken. You feel really lucky if somebody wrote this stuff on the back of the photo. I have lots of digital images (photos & scanned). How do you write on the back of a digital image. Irfan Viewer lets you put a lot of information inside a digital image. Nope it doesn't write the text on the image. The information is hidden inside the file. This means the information about the image is always with the image. Irfan Viewer lets you look at this information one image at a time.

Okay, so what does Exifer for Windows do? It lets you look at all the images in a directory / folder. It will display the image in one window and the information in another. This is really cool. But it is not the coolest thing that it can do.

Exifer will take the information about the all the images in a directory and put it in a format that can be put in a database. You can search for images based on this data. For example you can search for all images of old photos of Plain.

Imagine I have added information to my 20000+ images. I can give my images to somebody and they will be able easily see what is hidden on the computer disks.

This may be geeky and complicated. But if you don't add this data to images, you could be cheating future generations of some really neat information. I have only covered a small part of Exifer. Used with Irfan, you can manage your digital collection.

I find it amazing that a German and a Bosnian created two great image management programs. This just shows the power of the Internet.

http://www.exifer.friedemann.info/

 Analemmatic Sundial

How did our ancestors tell time in the past? They didn't have Timex watches. One way was with sundials. I saw a "Human Sundial" recently that really impressed me on what you can do with chalk. Basically it was numbers and months written on a sidewalk. It is an ellipse; 20 feet east-to-west and 13 feet north-to-south. A person stands on a month, holds his arms straight up, and where the shadow falls is the time. There is some complicated math behind this timepiece. It can even handle day-light savings time. Use www.google.com to find sites that describe this timekeeper.

Many of our "German" ancestors actually lived in Bohemia. This 13-page write-up gives a lot of nifty facts about marriage in the 1800's. http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/durer/23/var/wedding_traditions_and_habits.htm

Brigham Young University is offering over 20 self-study genealogy courses over the Internet. Six of these courses are about German genealogy. The price is right - free. These are self-study courses that you can complete at your own pace.

http://ce.byu.edu/is/site/special_offers/freecourses.dhtm

It has taken awhile, but I am finally convinced that Flip Album is a great way to share digital images, especially with relatives who are not computer experts. Flip Album lets you put your pictures into an electronic album that people can flip through a page at a time. You put these disks on a CD. Once the CD is put into the PC, it automatically starts up. If you have the version that lets you put more than one album on a disk, a bookcase of the albums are brought up from which you can choose. This is what makes Flip Album so great, it works like an old-time album. The program lets you edit your images, add text, add videos and add sound. It also lets you print the album out so you can give it to people without computers.

Flip Album comes in three flavors Standard 5.5 ($20), Suite ($50), and Professional ($129). The standard is the least powerful. The next level up, Suite, lets you: put more than one album on a disk, show the bookcase, have the disk automatically start when put into the PC and playback the disk on a regular DVD player hooked to your TV. The Professional gives you the unlimited license to sell albums made with Flip Album. The Professional also lets you encrypt and password-protect your albums.

I recommend that you buy the suite because it has the bells and whistles that you need. You can buy the program on the Internet at steep discounts, if you are willing to wait. I saw the Professional for $75 and the Suite for $30. Companies that didn't have the program in stock were offering these discounts. Look around and be careful whom you buy from. There is so much more that the program does that it can't be covered here. Check out the website for more information and the ability to download the program immediately (if you are impatient and have a cable/dsl Internet connection. Thanks to Bob Heck of MPAFUG for helping me to see the light.

http://www.flipalbum.com

In the old days, we shared information between PCs using floppy disks. Floppy disks are being phased out because they hold less than 2 million bytes, which is not very much. Within the last couple of years, they have come up with small storage devices that plug into your PC's USB port. These devices can hold a lot of information. I just bought one that holds 256 million bytes and it cost around $45. If you have a PC with Windows 98, ME or XP you just plug the drive into your PC. You don't have to install software. It is automatically recognized and works just like a regular disk drive. Plus, you don't have to turn the PC off to plug in the drive.

When I first heard of these devices, I thought big deal. If I want to carry around data, I can just burn a CD. However, it can be a pain to have to burn a disk every time you want to transfer data to another PC.

I use this USB drive to store copies of my key files: my genealogical databases, nifty programs and utilities that I might want to load onto other PCs, and files that I don't want to lose to a disk drive crash misplace or misplace where I put it.

I can load this drive with key files that I can use when I am out-of-town researching. If somebody wants one of my files or I want one of theirs, I plug in the drive and we can easily share the file.

This is a fantastic weekly newsletter that keeps you informed of neat stuff going on in the field of genealogy. There is free version. I pay the extra $20 or so a year to get the full newsletter. I don't go to bed on Sunday nights until the current issue hits my email box. I strongly recommend that you subscribe to at least the free version.

http://www.eogn.com

http://www.familyhistoryradio.com, which brought you the first online genealogical conference, is offering something new. Dick Eastman will have a weekly "radio" show about technology. He will also be giving a technology lesson once a month. Eastman is pretty well tuned into what is going on. I This is a little pricey at $9.95 a month or $49.95 for six months. According to the site, you will get access to all past shows and lessons in an archive haven't decided if I will give this a try or not. I guess I will wait for the reviews. Or maybe I will signup once every 3-6 months, for a month at $9.95, and use the archives.

There is a very nice quilt with images of the Plain area. I was surprised to find it being offered on Ebay by somebody in South Carolina. I was the only and winning bidder and won at $10.00. With postage and insurance the total cost was about $20. Just another reason to check Ebay for stuff.

The Wisconsin Historical Society is making a lot of its holdings available on the Internet in digital format. They have over 17,000 pages on eyewitness accounts of early American exploration and settlement on this site. This is a great site if you want read original documents from the 1490's to the 1840's.

http://www.americanjourneys.org

DorieDanelski has made some great research documents available.

There are CD copies of the Pronold Family History Book at the Kraemer Library and Community Center, the Spring Green library and the Sauk County Historical Society Museum in Baraboo.

The Otto Horz 3-volume dissertation is available in book form at the Sauk County Historical Society Museum in Baraboo. I also have a copy, which I have copied the 3 volumes to CDs. This CD will be available to our group. Horz's work covers the emigration of people from Waldmuenchen from the early 1800's to 1938. This work has detail lists of emigrates by the community they came from with some interesting details. Horz was killed in World War II and his thesis was not published.

If you go to the Universistadt of Marburg's website, you will see that they have a fiche copy of the report. Just goes to show that you don't have to limit your research to one town or county. There is stuff all over the world that you can get your hands on.

http://www.ub.uni-marburg.de/

Thanks to Dorie for a great contribution.

We had a pretty good size group at our first steering committee meeting. A number of different topics were discussed.

There was agreement that we need to strengthen our relations with the library board and the Friends of the Library. We need to ask them what their goals are and what can we do to support these goals. We believe one of the goals of the library is to bring more people into the library.

One way to increase the usage of the library is to find volunteers to "staff" the library at various times to help people research their families. The first step is to show people how our group can help them with their research. One way is to have a daylong meeting open to the public. Members of our group would bring their stuff in to show people what we got. Our members could work at different "stations." We could use several computers to show people how to search: the WHS library, the LDS church holdings, Ancestry.com census and other records. Other members could assist with various reference books, pedigrees, history books and such. During the day, we could show movies and slideshows in the main meeting room. We could have 4 or 5 small presentations on historical / genealogical topics. Everything is in the preliminary stage. I will throw out our Sat March 13, 2004 meeting as a possible date. At our next meeting, let us know your thoughts and how your might participate.

Another way to help the library is to develop research guides. Too many people have come into the library and not know how to start their research. These research guides would: describe what the library has, what our group has, what resources and in the area and checklist of things to do.

Taking a trip to the Franklin Township hall was recommended. There is a strong possibility that the building will be destroyed in the near future. It would be a great idea for our group to tour the building and document it with photos and personal observations.

We discussed having an "outreach coordinator" to make contact with other groups like ours in Sauk County. It would be interesting to see what these groups have, how we could share our resources and if there are projects that we could work on. One thought was to have one of our meetings at the Spring Green Library. I am sure there are at least a handful of people in the Spring Green area that would be interested in joining our group.

Another area to address is to update our brochures, business cards and website.

We discussed putting member information on the website. The downside is that this information can be used for identity theft. The positive part of having this personal information on the Internet is that it can help make contacts with other researchers. It was decided that members could decide whether they want to have this information on the website. We will need to update the current information on the website. At the next meeting we will give you a format in a word processing program. If you want to submit information to be put on the website you will need to fill out one of these forms. The current information on the website will be removed.

Currently The Weekly Home News has been very good about publishing articles about our upcoming meetings. We discussed expanding our relationship with this local newspaper. A weekly question-answer column on genealogy and possibly a longer monthly article on a local topic were things we thought the newspaper might be interested in. This would also be a way to attract people to our group.

The last half hour of future meetings will be dedicated to a steering committee. Noodle on the stuff we discussed at the first steering meeting and bring your comments and suggestions to the next meeting.

With our members located throughout the state and even the country, how we communicate is important. We currently use our newsletter, our website and email to communicate. We would like to explore different ways of communicating.

http://www.yahoo.com/ has got a lot neat ways to communicate. The neatest thing is that it is free (for now). I strongly recommend that all members of our group open an individual Yahoo account so that they can participate in this method of communication. At the next meeting we can help you set up an account. Here are some of the great things that Yahoo provides.

You get a free Yahoo email account. The free storage space is not very big, so I have bought a larger account. Some great things about the a Yahoo email account is that you can check it anywhere in the world and you are not likely to get a virus from email going through your Yahoo account.

Yahoo Messenger allows you to enter a list of other Yahoo users that you know. Yahoo Messenger will let you know if they are online. You can then send a typed message to these persons. Once you connect, you can use your PC's speakers and a microphone to actually talk to one another.

Yahoo has a Chat area. This is similar to Yahoo Messenger, but you can have a number of people on the same "line." This could have great potential. With microphones and cheap video cameras, we could hold online meetings and training sessions. This will be a great way for people all over the world could attend one of our meetings.

I have recently set up a group on Yahoo for the Plain History Genealogy Group. I strongly request that all members go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/phgg and join this group. You can do some great things with groups.

• you can post an email that will be automatically sent to all members of the group
• you can make files, photos and databases that can be shared with members of the group
• you can set up a calendar of future events so members know what is going on
• you can set up polls / surveys to find out what members think on various topics

It is going to take several months of experimenting before these methods of communication are working smoothly. There are a number of other high-tech ways to communicate that I haven't mentioned. Lets experiment with them.

My goal in the presentation and this article is to give you some ideas on how you can use digital images in your research. There are great books that give you the nitty-gritty details. You can also find a lot of stuff on digital images on the Internet. Hopefully you will find some stuff in this article that sparks an idea.

These cameras are great when you don't have a copier conveniently around. I have had very good luck taking pictures of books and printed materials. They are great when you are working with over-sized documents. I have used my digital camera to make "copies" of old family photos brought by relatives to reunions. Digital cameras are small and more convenient to carry around than a copier. Don't leave home without one.

I have also used my digital camera to digitize images instead of using my scanner. You can spend a lot of time putting the paper on the scanner, scanning the image, and taking the paper off the scanner. It can take 30 to 60 seconds per page. With a digital camera, it only takes about 10 seconds to take an image. True the quality isn't as good as a scanner's and the file sizes are big. But I recently used my camera to digitize over 1,200 images in less than a day. For technique, I put the image on a piece of white cardboard for background. I also use florescent lamps to light the image.

I have also used my digital camera to take pictures of displays on microfilm readers. This can save you the $.30 to $.50 that you have to pay for microfilm copies. It can be more convenient. For example at the Wisconsin Historical Society Library in Madison, you need to move your film to another machine to make a copy, if a film copier is available.

You have to experiment with your camera when taking a picture of microfilm reader's display. Experiment with the settings on your camera. Don't just use the automatic settings. Turn off the flash. Increase the sharpness. Try a lower "film speed" of 100 which captures the most detail. Play around with the camera positioning. I am tall so I can get good positioning. You want to get a "fairly" straight-on shot so the picture isn't skewed. You also want to try to minimize the glare from the reader's light source.

Which camera to get? Without question, the camera should be a 3+ million megapixel quality. Check out the batteries. You'll want to get a camera with "good" rechargeable batteries. A "good" rechargeable battery is one that will allow you take a lot of photos and can be recharged quickly and easily. You can spend a lot of money on batteries if your camera chews up a set of batteries to just take a handful of photos.

The next thing to consider is storage. This is the issue that can be strongly debated. Most digital cameras come with flash cards to store photos. There are four problems with flash cards in my opinion: they are expensive, the time it takes to transfer images from the card and the "limited" amount of storage and you have to erase the card's contents to use it again. The cost of the cards is coming down but they can still be pricey. Many cards can only hold one or two hundred high quality images. This can be a problem if you have a big project. I recently took photos of over 1200 pages. With compact flash, this would have been difficult.

That is why I chose the Sony Mavica Cameras that store images on small CD disks. These disks hold 185 million bytes and cost about $.50. These disks hold about 100 high quality images. With a 50-disk pack of these disks, I never run out of storage when I have taking photos. I never have to erase these disks in order to take more photos. It's nice to have a permanent copy of these images. I recently had my PC's hard disk crash. When I went to restore images, I found that my both of my backup disks were bad. Fortunately, I had the original disks created by my camera.

http://www.irfanview.com/

When you get a lot of digital images, you need to be able to manage them. Irfan is a great, free program that lets you manage almost every format of digital images. It's got a lot of nice features. I will give an overview of the stuff you can do with this program.

Basic editing: You can do all of the basic editing features: adjust color, adjust brightness, rotate, resize, and add special effects. Irfan isn't as powerful as programs like Jasc's Paint Shop Pro or Adobe's Photo Elements, but it does a decent job.

Thumbnails: When you have a directory full of images it is nice to see a small image (thumbnails) of what you have. True recent versions of Windows will let you create thumbnails on the fly. However Irfan lets you choose the size of the thumbnails. The smaller the thumbnail, the more images you can see on the screen and the quicker the computer will create the thumbnails. Larger thumbnails are easier to see but take longer to create.

Create Webpages: Irfan lets you create webpages of images that you can upload to your webpage. Irfan will create a page of thumbnails with links to the "big" image. A user of your webpage can click on one of these thumbnails and bring up the "big" image. I used Irfan to load my website with images.

SlideShows: Irfan lets you create slideshows of your images. These will play one image after the other. Irfan will also create an EXE version of the slideshow. This allows you send a slideshow to family and friends who don't have Irfan. You can put these files on a CD.

Adding Information to Images: The worst thing that can happen to a genealogist / historian is that you get an old photo that you know has your ancestors in it but you have no clue about who is in the picture. The great pictures are those that have information written on the back. How do you write on the back of a digital image? Irfan lets you add information to individual image files. You can use Exifer (described above) to make this information sing and dance. This information has a geek name of Metadata.

There are two types of Metadata EXIF and IPTC.

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) is automatically added to digital images by the camera. Most of the data captured in the EXIF format is geeky-photo stuff.

The International Press Telecommunications Council created the IPTC format. IPTC isn't a perfect standard, but it is widely used and was the "first kid on the block." This format allows you to enter the really good stuff. You can record titles, descriptions, where and when the image was created, categories and many other fields. You also have a "free format" keyword field that you can enter a bunch of information. For example you can enter the names of the all the people in a group photo. You can then put this in a database, which will allow you to search for all images that have a certain person in them.

If you combine Exifer and Irfan together, you can manage your digital image collections.

If you need to get a high quality digital image, a scanner is the way to go. Here are some things to think about when using a scanner.

Every Scanner is different: They all have their own little quirks and "problems." In order to successfully use a scanner, you have to use it a lot.

Buttons: Most new scanners have buttons which let you scan an image in one step. In the "old" days you had set your scanner settings, scan the image, set the directory, set the format, set the filename and save the file.

Business Cards. It is easy to smudge the glass of a scanner. I use a business card to get the paper off the scanner without leaving my fat fingerprints.

USB 2.0. Most of the new scanners hook up through your computer's USB port. There are a couple of flavors of USB ports. The older, slower version 1.? and the much higher speed 2.0 version. When you scan stuff, a lot of information has to go between the scanner and the computer.

If you do a fair amount of scanning you will what to upgrade your equipment. You can add a new 2.0 USB port to your PC for around $20. The new scanners that support 2.0 can be gotten for under $200.

35mm Slides and Film. You have to buy a "special" scanner to digitize these. Most new scanners can work with these. Because you need to scan at really high resolutions, it can take a "long" time to scan slides and films.

Microfilm. I credit this idea to Rhonda McClure. If you can scan 35 mm slides you should be able to scan microfilm and microfiche. You have to experiment to master the technique but it can be done.

Miscellaneous: Its nice to have a detachable cover on the scan when you scan over-sized documents. When choosing between scanners, look at Optical Resolution not Interpolated Resolution.

You can make a lot of adjustments / corrections to digital photos and other digitized images.

The "best" editing program is Adobe Photoshop. It can do almost anything you can think of. As one of the more expensive programs, it can make a serious dent in your wallet.

Adobe makes a cheaper version called Photo Elements that costs less than $100. The stuff that Elements is missing and Photoshop has, is mostly stuff that only professionals would use.

I use Paint Shop Pro. The current version number is 8. It is similar in price to Photo Elements. It has all the features that I need.

If you are going to edit photos / digital images you need to know definitions and some color theory.

How do you know what colors you should use on your image? Do you choose them just by they way they feel or are there some rules about how colors interact? There is a lot you can learn about color theory on the Internet and your image editor's tutorials and help sections.

http://www.udraw2.com/gallery/contrast/smcontrast.htm is a great site about color theory by Phillip Michael Thomas. This site talks about the "Principle of Simultaneous Contrast." If colors are COMPLENTARY, they will increase each other's quality. If colors are not complementary, the colors will shift toward one another. On the webpage, there is an example of an American flag in green, black and orange. If you stare at this backwards image of the flag for about 20 seconds and then look at a blank white page, you will see the flag in its correct colors.

Choosing the right color for a background can effect how one sees and image. For example, putting complementary colors next to one another makes colors seem more vibrant and brighter.

http://painting.about.com/library/glossary/blglossarycolourterms.htm has got a lot of definitions and descriptions of color terms and theory. This site had the following definition of complementary colors.

If you have trouble dressing yourself in the morning, you ought to read up on how colors interact on the Internet.

Quick definitions:

Emitted Light (PC Monitors) Additive
RGB (Red Green Blue)
HSL (Hue Saturation Lightness)
Reflected Light (Paper) Subtractive
CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black)
Brightness - Lightness / darkness
Contrast - overall light and intensity
Gamma Correction - adjust brightness & contrast of an image along with the color balance of an image
Hue - color tint, the particular frequency of light emitted or reflected (red vs green)
Luminance - brightness of a color (dark red vs bright red)
Saturation - purity of the hue / color, strength of the color (red vs pink)
Color temperature - low temperatures are more red, high temperatures are more blue
Vector Images - Lines, shapes, text
Raster Images - images of things

I recommend that you research the Internet to verify what I have said in this section. I am not known for my keen understanding of color.

Not every photo or digital image is perfect. You can correct many image problems with image editors.

Making color adjustments to a photo can be done in number of ways. Paint Shop Pro has a one button method that makes its best stab at a correction. You can pull up a form that lets you adjust each color individually. You can adjust contrast, saturation, and brightness in the same way.

Lots of old photos have scratches that you would like to get rid of. You first need to identify type of scratch you want to remove. Is it a "big" scratch or a bunch of "small" scratches. There is a separate tool that lets quickly remove each type of scratch.

A common problem in photos are people with "Red Eye" caused by a flash. All image editors have a tool that will "automatically" remove this problem.

Cloning is a neat trick to repair pictures. Cloning allows you to copy one part of an image to another. This is especially handy if you are trying to repair an image that has a chunk torn off. I have seen where legs have been "shared" on an adjusted image.

Sometimes you don't want to work with the entire image, just a piece of the image. Sometimes you want to copy a person from one photo to the other. Sometimes you want to adjust color or brightness in only one part of an image. Sometimes you want to change a color. Sometimes you want to change the background.

You can manually select an area by "drawing" a circle, rectangle or free-format shape. This selection method can be crude and not be very good.

I like to use the SMART EDGE feature. Say I want to select a person in a photo so I can put the image on a different background. Unfortunately, most people's heads are not circular or square. The Smart Edge feature lets you trace an image and it automatically selects an edge. Its magic.

You can also use the Magic Wand to make a selection. You can select an area based on it's color or brightness. If you click on an area with the Magic Wand, the program will select areas that have similar color or brightness. Determining what is similar is completely under your control. You can tell the program that you only want items that are the exact blue color. Or you can tell it that you what all shades of blue that close in color to the area that you clicked on.

Unless you are working with a simple image or are very lucky, it is difficult to get a good selection.

You can "add" or "subtract" areas from your selection. In Paint Shop Pro, if you hold down the SHIFT key when you select an area, this selection is added. If you hold down the CTRL key when you select an area, this selection is subtracted.

Selecting items on an image is a key skill to develop. You will need to work with your image editor to develop this skill.

One final thought. Sometimes it is easier to select what you don't want than it is to select what you do want. All good image editors will let you select what you don't want and then "reverse" the selection.

One of the most complicated and powerful tools in new image editors is Layers. Back in the old days if you wanted to change an image, you had to be careful. Say for example that you wanted to add text to an image. Before you made the change you had to be sure you had it right; color, font size, and spelling. Because once you made the change, it was part of the image and there weren't neat undo buttons. Layers take care of this problem.

How to describe layers? Normally an image only has one layer. Think of layers as the transparencies you use on overhead projectors. By putting several transparencies on top of one another, you can change the image that is displayed by the projector. You can see parts of "lower" transparencies that are not blocked by "higher" transparencies. Same as with layers.

You can split an image into several layers, which you can adjust individually. You can have layers for each of the colors Red Green Blue. You can have a layer for the background. You can have a layer for separate images that you want to combine. You can have a layer for almost anything. This way you only have to adjust a small part of the image.

You can rearrange layers. You can change the transparency of layers, which allow parts of "lower" layers to show through.

I demonstrated how layers can be used.
I took a photo of the old Catholic school in Plain.
I erased the handwritten notes from the images.
I converted the black & white image to a 16-bit color photo. It still was black & white, but now I could
use Paint Shop Pro's advanced editing features.
I then used the selection tool to select the sky.
I then used the Layer tool to make this selection a separate layer. I used this layer as the background.
I changed the color of this background layer to purple.
I created another layer between the background and the original image.
On this image I added my own text.
You can merge these layers to get a "normal" image.

You can find some great tutorials on Layers at http://www.webreference.com/

There is so much that can be said about using digital images. There are lots more tools that might be just what you need. The best way to learn this stuff is by working with this stuff. Hope I gave you ideas that you can use.

We want to get your comments and suggestions. garylhaas@yahoo.com
Be sure to check the website occasionally. solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/
Join our Yahoo Group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/phgg