What do Genealogists and ScanDigital have in common?
We are both passionate about preserving family history!
Last month, I went to the Southern California Genealogical Jamboree with other members of the ScanDigital team. While there, we had the opportunity to connect with people passionate about researching and preserving their family history and share our service as an aid to their archival projects. Genealogists may love viewing, sharing and learning about their family’s history, but many admitted that scanning and organizing their memorabilia is their least favorite part. Maybe that’s why so many people seemed relieved to hear about ScanDigital- we do all the hard, time consuming work for them. We chatted with and introduced our company to lots of new people, met with well-known genealogists and had a great time.
We had the chance to meet with some pretty amazing people while at the show. One being Maureen Taylor, otherwise famously known as the ‘Photo Detective.’ She specializes in analyzing old photos, finding missing photos, interpreting unidentified pictures and organizing photo collections. And in the Genealogical World, she’s quite famous. People were on waiting lists for her lectures and lined up at her booth to have her analyze specific photos. For more information on Maureen, visit the Photo Detective.
I also had the opportunity to sneak away from our booth to attend DearMyrtle’s lecture titled ‘3 Months to Better Organization.’ Myrtle is also very well known in the Genealogy World and I was lucky enough to find one of the last available seats. Her lecture was jam packed!
Her talk was very interactive as she gave the audience ‘challenges’ or tasks to help themselves get their collections more organized. One of Myrtle’s tasks was related to the importance of having your old photos scanned and home movies converted to digital format. It was so nice to have such a highly regarded person not only recognize the importance of digital preservation, but rather preach this message to her audience.
When this ‘task’ was assigned, a couple audience members even shouted out ‘ScanDigital’ as a way to offer our service as a suggestion! How flattering!
DearMyrtle provides fantastic advice for Genealogists and her website was even ranked one of the top ‘101 Best Webs Sites in 2009’ in Family Tree Magazine. If you are interested in learning more about gathering and organizing your family history, definitely check out DearMyrtle.
Overall, the show was a great success. I even walked away with a newly developed curiosity to explore my own family’s past. It was definitely a good push to re-ask my own grandparents certain questions. Their photos are preserved, but the stories behind them should be documented alongside them. I may take Myrtle’s advice to video record my grandparents telling the stories behind their old photos- I think I’m up for that challenge.
As preserving your pictures is a great tool to revive your memory with past stories, we can help. If you have any questions about converting your old photos or home movies to digital format to relive these memories with loved ones, please feel free to contact us at 1-800-333-2808 or on Twitter at @ScanDigital or @PamelaSD.
Tags: Genealogical Jamboree, genealogy, scgs
I enjoyed this! Well done!
I think this was a very interesting post thanks for writing it!
Howdy! This post couldn’t be written any better! Reading this post reminds me of my good old room mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this post to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thanks for sharing!