Copying a file of letters

 A family member stumbled across a file of correspondance with my grandfather and knew that I would be interested in reading them and sharing them with others in the family. :)  I am still wondering what happened to grandpa's archives, which I have found referenced (not just in my head).

"Last week, when filing away the past year's Tattlers... We have accumulated six great volumes of our letters and thier replies" -- JCP April 2, 1984

Here it is a nice summer day and I am home in my office. defensively citing rumors of jellies. sigh. Did actually go to bed at a recent hour. Reading about grief and estates seemed like a good stopping point.  (To be fair there were bits that made me smile too.) Besides I was reading ahead. Trying to use my curiosity as a goad to scan the files. Besides part of the fun may be reminiscing with others over things like preserving food, celebrations, ...

So how to best take advantage of the short term loan? I do not have a good process in place for cataloguing archives, backing up pictures, transcribing documents.  (digress to documents still not standardized in gedcom/GRAMPS), ....  What do I have? or can I easily obtain and use for free?

Scanning

I have a  Canon Color Imageclass MF743Cfw. I am able to scan from the DELL XPS XPS 13 9380 running Windows 10 Home using the driver, but not from the Apple Macbook Pro. Choices include Photo (which creates a jpg file), Document (which creates a PDF), and OCR (which creates a jpg too). My trial page (The Old Times) with the OCR was useless. The images are placed in my oneDrive directory by date - so nominally backed to cloud.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Since I was not happy with the results of what I had, I googled OCR software. Started with wikipedia. Got different results when searching now (See yesterday's facebook). The obvious choice that was on multiple lists was using GoogleDoc, which I use for other purposes. Drag and drop the image to upload. The open the image with google docs (right click as an image viewer is the default). Tried with jpg - viola! Tried with pdf - more jibberish. The resulting doc has the image and the text. Sweet.

I was pleasantly suprised that it handles handwritting too - putting it in a different color.
(Yes I was aware of the concept most recently from the 1950 census, but I had not actually done this.)

It appears as though it would handle German. I'll have to see if I can gain access to stuff from Fritz again.

Cataloguing Archives

Started with a google doc containing a table. Missing functionality of a spreadsheet. It is easy enough to add text to a spreadsheet or maybe include one... I know I talked shareware used by librarians with a couple of folks in the past, but had not yet embraced it for my own files. I am saving the following fields title (subject). date. to, from, notes (ie private),

I created a folder with the owner and the correspondant. I am naming the files YYYYMMDD subject.

Indexing

people? subjects? automating? (which Carl Bud?) same spreadsheet?

Backups


I should probably print a hard copy of the images. Is using the cloud sufficient? Should I get some more thumb drives and a bank box? sigh - still need to finish recovery of mac, backup mac, ...

Sharing

For the moment I am giving the owner of the archive, comment permission to each document, including my index. I have not figured out how to best share it with the family - some have google accounts. I do not intend to make it open to the public or give ownership to familysearch etc.

One of the ideas discussed was to use one of the services that can create a bound book based on a series of images.

References

a friend mentioned a book https://www.margotnote.com/creatingfamilyarchives
(it backed off on technology, as it is quickly out of date. It also made me bump up the priority of scanning movies and slides.)


Comments

  1. paffyOctober 4, 2022 at 4:06 AM

    Sometimes the OCR generates gibberish in an alphabet I don't understand. I have been using Tools>Voice input. It is rather limited in its punctuation with period, comma, colon, semi colon, question mark, and exclamation point, but not ellipses, quotes, or dashes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. paffyOctober 4, 2022 at 4:10 AM

    When I do get English text it is often in a mix of fonts, sizes, and colors. Format>clear formatting. I do like differentiating typed and hand written.

    ReplyDelete
  3. paffyOctober 4, 2022 at 9:33 AM

    I also started a google spreadsheet to track, provenance and list the letters. (started with a doc, but quickly changed so I can filter/sort my table.)

    ReplyDelete
  4. paffyOctober 4, 2022 at 10:20 AM

    I realized that some might just look at the file per letter without looking at the project spreadsheet. I added watermarks mentioning the archive and the transcriber. (Had to go back and add this to recently done documents. Was cleaning up formats anyway.)

    ReplyDelete

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