The Unknown Collection

Back of photo

Edward Joseph and Charles Hambright

Another photo from my scrapbook of unknowns.  Always hoping for a genealogically connected angel to swoop down and help identify some of these pictures!

What I know about the pictures is pretty obvious from what can be seen on the back of the card.  The boys are apparently Edward Joseph and Charles Hambright and the photo was taken by J.E. Sonnenberg in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, but I don't know what these boys are to my family. Relatives?  Friends?

Now this scrapbook was from a member of my Quirk line and my family is all from the Hazleton area of eastern Pennsylvania and this photo was from Allegheny City in western Pennsylvania.  I do know that there was at least one family member that moved to the Pittsburgh/Allegheny area from this side of the family.  Perhaps there were more?  Did my ancestors move from the Pittsburgh area and then to eastern Pennsylvania?  Possibly, but most likely these relatives moved from eastern to western PA.

I may need to do some research on Joseph and Charles Hambright.  Perhaps they lived close to my Lee relatives.  Always neat to realize that there may be other ways to get through brick walls...and maybe, if I'm very lucky, I may find out who Edward Joseph and Charles Hambright are to my family!

21COFH - Processing Photos & Files

Reading 'Twas the Night Before Christmas

This week's assignment from Michelle Goodrum (Turning of Generations) for the 21st Century Organized Family Historian is Process Photos & Files.  The instructions:

-Transfer the photos to your computer or wherever you store them.
-Use the scheme you decided on from last week.
-Use tags and metadata if doing so.
-Adjust/process photos as needed (and time allows)
-Back up your work!

What a great idea this it is too!  I have tons of photos from the holidays (and Halloween, and the first day of school, and the summer, and....) that need to be transferred over to my computer, but more than that...

I have a system (when I use it, and I really need to get on it), where I get the pictures to my computer, name them, make any adjustments to the photos, delete ones that just don't make the cut, and then I get them off my computer.  That's a habit my husband started me on.  I take so many pictures, I can fill a hard drive in no time!  So I upload the named and corrected pictures to Shutterfly (cloud storage) and then I transfer them to the backup drive in our home.  I'm trying to only keep pictures on my actual laptop that I'm currently using (this does include all genealogy related photos).

I was able to get 3 sets of photos named, tagged, and uploaded...our Cub Scout Pack marching in the Veterans Day Parade, Our Pack's Christmas Caroling and Christmas Eve.  I kept my tags simple.  Just a name of who is in the picture, the date if known, and event.  I have a Mac so I can actually type in a location a tag it on a map (very cool).


Now I just need to keep up with it!

I'm motivated to continue.  Not difficult to do (although it can be time consuming).  Just pop in a movie or listen to music and organize files!  Great idea, Michelle!

Sorting Saturday - Photo Files

Benjamin and Daniel Cayemberg with their Papa, Patrick Cayemberg.

So last Saturday I was looking for pictures of my boys picking apples in Wisconsin. It was about 3 years ago that we went and I had some great pictures of my boys having fun with their parents and grandparents in the orchard.  I couldn't find the pictures on my laptop.  My desktop is a hopeless wreck and is soon to be replaced...I wasn't even going to attempt to log onto that thing!  But I swore that they should have been on  my laptop!  Couldn't find them.

Over the summer I had installed Windows 7 over my crap program, Windows Vista (an evil joke Microsoft put out that should have been labeled as malware considering how it wreaks havoc on everything).  I suppose because we tried installing it over top of the old program it took up more space and we had issues with me running out of room on the hard drive.  I'll stop trying to be technical, because I can only pretend to understand the headache that was my computer in past months...fixing the technological train wreck was my hubby's job.  The point is, after we resuscitated my computer and fixed the space problem I noticed pictures missing.

Benjamin Cayemberg - Wisconsin, Autumn 2007

All was not lost.  I do have a backup on an iomega drive (I do need to back it up more frequently though), so I pulled out the iomega and started transferring files back over to my laptop, and then actually backing up my laptop (not just pictures, but everything).  What I realized was that I needed to reorganize my files.  I had a good system, but grew neglectful of it.  So that's what I spent a few hours of my time doing last Saturday.  It felt good too.

So what's my system for sorting my photos?  Well, I used to file them by date when I was younger.  That's wonderful if you can remember when something happened.  I found that through the years I couldn't remember, but I could remember places. 

Daniel Cayemberg - Wisconsin, Autumn 2007

I haven't been outside the U.S. yet (apart from a couple short day trips to Mexican border towns that didn't include pictures), so my  folders are by state.  I upload my pictures to Shutterfly, so within each state folder I have at least 2 sub-folders..."for upload" & "uploaded".  Pretty self-explanatory.  I don't take a lot of video with my camera (I'm bad...I should take more), so if I actually have video, I put that in it's own sub-folder.

It's a system that works for me.  It may not work for everyone.  I mean, the bottom line is that you've got to be able to find your stuff.  As long as you can find your files, that's what really matters!