Saving Our Ancestral Records


PRESENT
In the fall of 2000 the computer technology committee of AHSGR moved that the society purchase a production scanner for this purpose. A Kodak 1500D scanner was demonstrated to the board of directors at that meeting and a motion passed for purchase of that model scanner, but funding was not then available. At a subsequent meeting of the California District Council (CDC) a request was made for donations to assist in the purchase of such a scanner. At that meeting enough money was generously donated by CDC members to purchase a Kodak 1500 D scanner, which sells for over $7,000. That CDC owned scanner was delivered in November, 2000 to the home of the technology committee chairman where it was set up, configured and a learning process began. During this process, he scanned and OCR'd (Optical Character Recognition) all of the AHSGR periodicals (Workpapers, Journals, & Clues) and saved those files on CD Rom for posterity. Incidentally, those are now being proofread by a dedicated team of volunteers and will be included in the keyword indexing.

In January, 2001 the CDC scanner team of Bob and Marge Benson and Ken Leffler took the scanner to Fresno, CA where we began the tedious task of scanning a wall of file cabinets crammed full of 5x8 obituary cards.

Click on the small photo below to see a larger version.

Eilene Schneider
 Joan Kincaide
Eileen Schneider

 Joan Kincaide
Bob Benson & Ken Leffler Eilene Schneider & Diane Bell
Bob Benson & Ken Leffler

 Eileine Schneider & Diane Bell
The start was not good. The volunteered computer we attempted to use would not configure properly for the scanner SCSI interface, so it was back home to get another computer. Then the scanner, although it handled the 8 1/2 X 11 pages of the periodicals ok, did not want to feed and process the much heavier card stock. After some software setting changes and primarily a change in which the rather stiff cards were prepared and inserted in the feeder magazine, we were underway. With the help of a group of dedicated volunteers from the Central California Chapter, the entire collection of obits in that library were scanned and saved as TIFF images (a computer picture of the actual obituary) and burned on CD Roms. There were over 144,000 obits scanned and saved in 10 working days, working 15 hours per day with no breaks. Intent was to keep the scanner working all the time. The old adhesives that were used to paste these clippings to the card stock caused multiple problems. We had to stop every 5,000 scans to meticulously clean the machine and the adhesive dust caused respiratory problems for some of the volunteers. We exceeded the daily scan parameter for the machine by ten fold and did eventually wear out a tensioner bar which was repaired after this session. The CCC volunteers provided not only food, but lodging for us during this session. Our thanks to them!!

In April, 2001 following the AHSGR board business meetings in Hays, KS the scanner was delivered to AHSGR headquarters in Lincoln by the CDC scanning team. A team of volunteers from the Lincoln chapter had been set up and were eager to get some brief training and get started. The same procedure was repeated there with 198,247 obituary cards being scanned in the identical 10day/15 hour per day period.

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card preparation
 card preparation
card preparation

 card preparation
Phil Dinges Ruth White & Lenny Schneider
Phil Dinges

 Ruth White & Lenny Schneider
The volunteers there were as proficient as those in Fresno and the cards were more pliant due to the fact that these cards are used at convention every year and are fondled and flexed repeatedly, so the adhesive was less of a problem. Again we were fed by the volunteers. Thanks to the Lincoln volunteers and to some board members who stopped by and assisted in this effort. During each of the two efforts portion or all of the clippings would separate from the card stock and would sometimes be adrift in the scanner long after the actual image had gone through. In No case were these overlooked. The volunteers would locate the original and reglue it leaving the card files in both locations better than when we started. Another plus is that misfiled cards were refiled in their proper order. A misfiled card is, in effect, a lost card.

The Northern Colorado Chapter (NCC) had done a similar project scanning and saving obituary clippings and other articles from a collection of scrapbooks housed in the Windsor, CO Museum.

Click on a photo to see a larger photo and read part of the article.

Anna Marie Thout Flot Helen Propp Miller


This effort differed in that the books had to be disassembled, the entire pages scanned and then the individual article, varying from a few to many per page, were cropped and each saved as an individual file. These individual files were then OCR'd (Optical Character Recognition), a computer's way of turning the words in the picture of the obit into actual text, and manually keyword indexed using software created by CIC (Computer Information Concepts) in Greeley, CO. All that data was hand typed by that team. That database of 4,313 files of obituary notices, chapter events and birthday/anniversary announcements is now available for researchers to use at the Windsor/Severance, CO Public Library in Windsor, CO. Congratulations to that team of volunteers!

Phase I of the project is now complete, that is, preservation of these obituaries. Phase II was to create a basic index of these files for posting on the AHSGR website so that the membership would know what is available. That would have been an excellent start, but in looking at the software package used in the NCC project, the technology committee decided to pursue with CIC the feasibility of generating a keyword searchable database from these 342,000 files. Larry Bohlender, a GR himself, and President of CIC and his staff worked with us on this idea and came up with a proposal for a hardware/software package that could, indeed, accomplish this at some considerable cost. This indexing will be done using a highlight method in lieu of the typing process done by the NCC, a real timesaver.

This proposal was presented to the technology research committee in April of 2001 in Hays, KS and a motion was approved to submit the project for approval to the board of Directors and Trustees. The combined boards approved and funded the project, a major forward technology step for AHSGR. A contract was signed by AHSGR and CIC earlier this year, the hardware (server, scanner, printer, network hardware) was installed in headquarters in Lincoln and configured along with three new Dell state of the art workstations purchased as a result of another technology committees motion. All obsolete equipment and unauthorized or unnecessary software was removed and disposed of, training sessions conducted by CIC, and AHSGR now has a state of the art office system in place with trained staff and the capability of performing the next phase of this project, that the monumental task of creating the AHSGR obituary data base now officially named SOAR (Saving Our Ancestral Records) a name approved by the boards at the convention business meetings in June, 2001.

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