Genealogy Jottings

Last week I was too sick to work on digitizing my photos of cemetery markers. This week, the computer was too sick for it.

I began happily enough on Monday, zipping through all my Colorado photos. The flatbed scanner worked just fine for this, and the photos went smoothly to a temporary folder. From there, I labeled everything and moved the images into their permanent folders. I had set up several of these for towns in the state where my ancestors have lived, including Boulder, Cañon City, Denver, and Fountain.

On Tuesday, I sat down at the computer to scan a handful of Nevada photos. Instead of finding the desktop screen with the scanner icon, I encountered a black screen telling me the computer needed to be rebooted. I did so, and proceeded to scan the first photo. It did not go to the same temporary folder I had used the day before. Somehow the path had changed with the reboot. I tried it again. This time the black screen reappeared, but now it contained an ominous Hard Disc Failure message.

Well, this was discouraging. I was using a brand new computer, installed just the week before. What had gone wrong? Even my husband/tech advisor was stumped. He finally resorted to calling the manufacturer, and a repairman is scheduled to look at it on Monday. No more scanning until sometime next week unless I want to connect the scanner to a different computer (I don’t). So I spent the week on the other computer doing data entry from a few documents I have collected over the winter.

All is not lost on the scanning front, though. I am registered to attend a scanning workshop tomorrow. The Computer Interest Group of the Colorado Genealogical Society is hosting a day-long seminar on scanning, digitizing, and genealogy software products. Maybe I will pick up some good tips before I get too far along in my own project.

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