New Year's Scan-A-Thon

After a recent trip to Illinois to visit my parents for Christmas I came home with a number of family artifacts that my Mom has acquired over the years as her mother downsized, moved and eventually passed away.  She and I spent Christmas morning going through some of my maternal grandmother’s collection.  I was amazed at what she had acquired in her long life and there was so much to go through. It really was very overwhelming.  My grandmother, Clem Stenger Miars had seemingly kept every card ever sent to her.  She had clipped and saved every obituary she ever read and every funeral card from every wake she attended.  I had seen some of these items before and had already brought home from previous trips quite a bit of stuff that still needs to be scanned, cataloged and preserved.  How would this ever get done and when??  I’m not sure if I scanned all day every day I would ever get it completed.

There was no time for a reflective look at each artifact that we came upon.  I had to make a very quick decision about what I was going to bring home with me on this trip and what would have to wait for later.  I remembered the other family history related items that I had at home still waiting to be processed so I tried hard to temper my need to bring everything with me now.  It was very exciting to come home with some new finds and a renewed feeling of trying to get these artifacts preserved and cataloged.

This past weekend I decided to have a “scan-a-thon” day where all I would do is scan and wait to do the citations and file name adjustments until later.  The priority for this scanning day was anything I had brought home that my Mom wanted back.  That went pretty well and I was very happy with the progress I made.  Now I am trying to work on citations and fixing file names for everything from the “scan-a-thon”.  When I opened up the first file in order to create a citation for it I found in the scanned documents folder my maternal grandfather’s high school diploma.  I do not recall seeing this before so I was very excited to be working on it.  It tells me that Robert Miars graduated from Brimfield Township High School on 26 May 1933.

On the back of that diploma was a list of all 19 members of his high school class of 1933.  I recognized some of the surnames and tried to image what their plans were on that important date.  My grandfather had lost his father the year before his graduation so I would think he was very lucky to be graduating at all. 

This made me realize that I really know very little about my grandfather’s life between the time he graduated from high school in May 1933 and when he married in May 1941.  My to-do list for researching his life has grown because of seeing this diploma.  Where did he live?  How did he make a living? These are just a couple of questions that come quickly to mind.  I will need to create more focused research questions and then follow the normal process to get them answered.

The next document that I came upon in my scanned folder was a “Memorial Record” booklet for my great grandfather, Frank Miars.  In reviewing this I found a photo of him that I do not think I had seen before.  The booklet seems to have been created by one person based on the handwriting.  There are pages in this booklet for names of family members, memorial donations, flowers that had been sent, pall bearers, etc.  I need to review each of these names to see if I know all of them and if not add them to my To Do list for future research.

One of my concerns when I brought home more family artifacts to scan and preserve is the impact on my very limited research time.  I do not have a great deal of time while working full time to do all the research I would like.  I can see now though that putting on my “family archivist” hat for a while is really another facet of my overall research activities and should be included in my research plans.  There is no need to see this work as not contributing to moving my traditional family history research forward.  After looking at just two items I have found holes in my research or new avenues to research for two members of my direct line.  Reviewing these family artifacts is just another facet of this work for me.

So…now what? I have done three or four of my new scanned files and dozens more to do.  Well….I am going to continue to get all of these artifacts scanned, citations crafted and source labels (digital) created for them.  I also want to start a catalog of these artifacts.  I have already found a small scrapbook that I scanned previously but never did anything with after that.  I brought it home again this trip when I did not need to.  Preservation of these original materials needs to happen too.

I was very overwhelmed on Christmas day to find all of these items.  But now I have the outline of a plan for processing them and managing them.  I can also see that they will make my traditional family history research more robust than just vital records or census records.  I can do this….one scan at a time…one artifact to process.

2018 - I am starting out right!  Bring it on!

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