Motivation Monday - Q1 Goal Update

Back in January I outlined my three big genealogical goals for the year.  In short they were:

• Continue my genealogical education.
• Attend a genealogy event.
• Write more.

 With the first quarter of 2013 behind me, I thought I'd take a look at my goal progress.

Goal 1: Continue my genealogical eduction.

This one hasn't gone so well.  After a couple of tries, I received a passing grade on Lesson 5 of the NGS Home Study Course.  I still need to finish writing up the Lesson 6 assignments and get those turned in.  I did attend one online seminar about DNA testing, which I found interesting.  It took some of the mystery out of using DNA for genealogical research.  I'm still not sold on having a test done myself, but it was neat to learn about.

Goal 2: Attend a genealogy event.

This goal will be completed two weeks from now.  I registered for the New England Regional Genealogical Consortium conference in Manchester, New Hampshire.  I'll be spending three days among fellow genealogists at my first convention.  If I'm not too tired at the end of each day, expect blog updates about my experience.  It looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.  I'm really looking forward to it.

Goal 3: Write more.

Done.  While I haven't been able to write every couple of days like I had hoped, I'm still writing more than I have in the past few years.  Sticking with short targeted posts has helped.  In addition, the blog has put me in touch with a couple of contacts, and led me to read other blogs, which are helping me stay motivated.

Overall, I'm attaining my 2013 goals.  The one area that I need to focus more on is education.  The NERGC conference will help with that, but I really need to buckle down and work more on the NGS course.

Shopping Saturday – Buying Alcohol

One of the things that I love as a genealogist and family historian is being able to touch the past, sometimes physically, allowing me to learn a little more about what my family before me lived through.

The other morning I was hunting for a piece of paperwork and came across this card that belonged to my great-uncle.  Note the dates on the back.  The year was 1944.  The United States was in the midst of World War II, and here in Vermont rationing had been put into effect.

Rationing is one of those things that you learn about in school while studying the War, probably in a small paragraph of text and a short discussion with the teacher.  It’s really sort of a small concept, not something you would focus on while learning about all the battles and political leaders and countries that shaped the War.

This little card, wrinkled as it is, brings the concept of rationing during World War II into focus.  It also tells me a little more about my Uncle Ken, and what his life was like when he was younger.  Checking the dates, all of his liquor purchases were made on Mondays.  Was this due to a restriction on when liquor could be purchased, or was that the day that he always made a run into town for supplies?  He didn't purchase alcohol every week, but also didn't seem to purchase based on any sort of holiday schedule.  This actually matches my memories of him in his later years.  He would drink occasionally, but not any sort of schedule that I recall.  He definitely wasn't the sort who always had a drink in his hand, but he loved the occasional Blackberry Brandy or would have a beer on a hot day.  Was this just to sort of person that he was, or was part of it instilled in him due to living through both the Great Depression and rationing during World War II?

Whatever the reason for the dates of his purchases, it's neat to have this little bit of his life, especially considering that this was from around the time that he took in his sister-in-law, my grandmother, and began acting as a foster-father to my mother, and therefore a grandfather to me and my siblings.  He and my grandmother lived together for 50+ years, and he's one of the people that I can thank for telling me stories of "the old days" that eventually led to my interest in local history and genealogy.

Mobile Monday – CamScanner

Like many people, I spent yesterday’s Easter Sunday with family.  In my case, this involved a visit to my wife’s parents, complete with Easter lunch, napping on the couch, Easter dinner, and some impromptu genealogy work.

One of the mysteries in my wife’s lines is her great-grandfather, Vincent Leliukas.  He went by several names, and lived in different places, making him somewhat difficult to trace.  In the last few months we’ve been in contact with a long-lost cousin, who was able to provide more information and documentation, but no one had a photo.

After dinner yesterday, my wife and I started looking through photo albums that had been left by her grandmother.  I had a vague memory of seeing a photo of Vincent many years ago while my wife and I were dating, but at the time, no one was really sure if it was him, and I wasn’t actively researching her family.  To my delight, we not only found the photo in question, we found a couple of others, labeled by my wife’s grandmother as being images of her father.

To our surprise, we also found Vincent’s Social Security card, dated 1937, in an old wallet.

Here’s where technology, and today’s software review, jumps in.

Obviously, I wanted to record our findings, while also preserving the items.  I pulled my Android phone from my pocket, and loaded up an application that I had downloaded a couple of months ago.  The software in question was CamScanner, an application that turns your phone into a portable scanner.

I’ve only used the application a couple of times, and I’m using the free version, so I may be missing some features.  My short review, however, is that I like it.

To use CamScanner, you use your phone’s camera to take a snapshot of a document.  The screen has a handy “bubble level” in one corner to help you take the best flat image of the document possible.  You can crop the image, then watch as the software turns the image into a PDF.  Even better, if you take another image, it gets added to the PDF as another page.  Very handy for “scanning” pages of books.

Partial Scan from CamScanner

They biggest downside that I’ve found with CamScanner, so far, is that it doesn’t work very well for creating scans of photos.  The reason for this is that the flash of the camera creates a glare on the surface of the photo.  As of yet, I’ve found no way to turn the flash off while scanning.  However, for scanning documents, like Vincent’s Social Security card that we found yesterday, it works very well.  I was even able to scan a folder full of handwritten notes, bundled into a single PDF file, to send to a fellow researcher.

While I wouldn’t use CamScanner for anything needing a high-resolution image, but it’s great for research trips, especially for trips like I had yesterday, where the research was completely unscheduled and impromptu.  All I had to do was take my phone out of my pocket, and start clicking.  For documents, I use CamScanner to create a PDF.  For photos, I just take a snap-shot with my phone's camera, suppressing the flash to eliminate the glare.  When I get home, everything gets uploaded to my laptop, where I can analyze and document any finds.