Wordless Wednesday - Four Generations

This picture contains four generations of my grandmother's family! On the left is Nils (Nelson) Pehrsson, my great great great grandfather. Beside him (back row) is his daughter, my great great grandmother, Alice Mary Peterson. Beside her is her daughter, my great grandmother, Mildred Grace Watts. In the front is Mildred's eldest daughter, my grandma's sister, Dorothy Angus.

Preserving my childhood memories

Yesterday, I was looking for a picture of myself from elementary school to scan. So I pulled out my old School Days Treasures book, a book which has way more stuff in it than it was ever meant to hold, so it's bursting at the seams, and is consequently really hard to browse through.

As I did this, it occurred to me to that I should be scanning this stuff. That my overstuffed collection of school work, school photos, report cards, certificates, etc., probably won't last forever, but that I could still keep it forever on a tiny little flash drive (or two; backups are important!).

So I can add that to my list of massive scanning projects! After I finish my grandma's photos, I'd like to do all my School Days Treasures stuff, and eventually all my photos from my pre-digital camera days.

And then there's my dad's collection of pictures. I'm afraid to even fathom how big a job that will be. Not only did my parents take about a gazillion pictures when my sister and I were kids, but my dad also inherited his mother's photo collection. So it'll be a while before I'm short of things to scan! :)

For now, enjoy this cute picture of a grade 4 me, when I was finally starting to grow into my two front teeth!

What I've been up to

I've been suffering from a bit of writer's block of late. But I'm still here! Just a bit quieter than usual... So I thought I'd give a quick update on what I've been up to lately.

I've been working on my one place study of St. François Xavier. I haven't gotten a whole lot done on that yet, since I only have Saturday mornings to work on it, and one Saturday a little trip to the emergency room took up my whole day and sort of ruined my plans. But other than that I've worked on it every Saturday, and another researcher there gave me the idea of photographing the pages I'm transcribing, so I can work on them at home. I don't have a professional camera, just a little digital one, but it's worth a shot! If I can take pictures that are as easy to read as the paper copies, then that could really speed up my work on this project! So I'll be trying that out this weekend.

I've also started on a website for the one place study. I got some space at Freepages (did you know you can get free web space there for genealogy?!), and so far I've put hardly anything on it, and it's very plain and ugly. But eventually it will be pretty and full of information! You can visit my Freepages here.

Other than that, I've mostly been working on my Acadian ancestors on WikiTree. Not doing a whole lot of research, just merging profiles and starting to add some sources (pretty much just the censuses). Soon I plan to add sources from Stephen A. White, because it turns out that a copy of his Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (basically the Bible of Acadian genealogy, and rather hard to find) is at the St. Boniface Historical Society! So sometime soon I'll be making time to flip excitedly through that. :-)

I got photo albums!!

Yay! I just went on a shopping spree at Michael's, and the most exciting part of today's haul is two great big acid-free, lignin-free photo albums! They were a whopping $30 each on sale, but each one holds 400 4x6in. pictures! Which means that all the pictures I've scanned so far would fit in one and not even fill it.

So, I'm going to start moving the photos I've already scanned into a new album. Then, I'll get back to my scanning (which has been neglected lately since it didn't feel worth the effort when I didn't have these new albums to move the pictures into yet), and as I scan I'll move those photos into the new albums. Then I can toss those awful magnetic photo albums and my grandma's photos can avoid disintegration for a while longer! :)

Me right now, admiring my fancy new albums: