UpFront with NGS: Photographs

Showing posts with label Photographs. Show all posts

06 January 2017

George Eastman Museum Releases Over One Quarter of a Million Photographs!

George Eastman Museum Releases Over One Quarter of a Million Photographs!

There is always something about an image ... “seeing” what we may have only just imagined. It might be “meeting” an ancestor for the first time via their photograph. Or, seeing the church founded by and worshipped for generations in by your family. Possibly viewing a place of importance to them. Regardless, images have a tendency to produce a visceral reaction in the viewer.

More and more archives of images are regularly becoming available. The most recent one to catch my eye is the one by The George Eastman Museum; after all his name is so synonymous with early photography.

The George Eastman Museum, among the oldest archives of photography in the world, recently launched an online platform that allows you to search through over 250,000 objects from its collections. Aside from thousands of photographs that date back to the medium’s earliest years, the digital archive also features objects from its massive library of artifacts that together chronicle the history of image-making, from vintage cameras to film splicers to advertisements for the Eastman Kodak Company. There is also plenty of material related to the eponymous founder himself — did you know he was a shooter in more ways than one?

Read more about what’s been placed online via Over 250,000 Photographs from the George Eastman Museum Go Online (Hyperallergic).

What image or image series did you find most compelling?

Editor’s Note: Check out related Upfront with NGS posts on photography, photos, images, and historic photos.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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10 March 2016

20 Free and (Relatively) New Genealogy and Family History Resources, 2016 Version, Part 3

My present continues ... 20 more FREE (or mostly FREE) resources ...

AUSTRALIA

1. The Ryerson Index -- an index to death notices appearing in Australian newspapers. The date range covered extends from the Sydney Gazette of 1803 up to newspapers published within the last week or so

CUBA

2. “Cuban equivalent” of Ancestry.com a boon to family historians

HUNGARY

3. Portrait of a Forgotten Hungary: Legendary Photographer’s 1500 Turn-of-the Century Pictures Made Public

IRELAND

4. Register of Deeds Index Project Ireland

MEXICO

5. The Historical Archives of Monterrey are Now Online

UNITED KINGDOM

6. Researchers to uncover crimes and forensic secrets hidden in Britain's historic wax seals

7. Runaway Slaves in Britain: bondage, freedom and race in the eighteenth century

8. East Sussex Record Office et al Digital Collections

9. The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

UNITED STATES

10. Aspiration, Acculturations, and Impact, Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930 [Harvard]

11. Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Announces 2015 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives Awards

12. Municipal Archives offer rare glimpse into NYC’s nearly 400-year history most people will never know

13. Know Your Digital Storage Media – A guide to the most common types of digital storage media found in archives

14. eGENEe -- a catalog of genealogy and history websites

15. [NC] Civil Rights Movement Digital Collection

16. Freedom on the Move [Cornell]

17. Discover Pittsburgh’s [PA] History online

18. Penny Postcards

19. History Colorado Online Collection

20. Uncle Remus Regional Library System [GA] – Digital Newspaper archive

Editor’s Note: As of today, each of the above links worked. Now, whether the links in any of the identified articles work, I cannot vouch for that. And, armed with the information provided, it should be relatively easy to get to determine where the discussed database currently resides. If you get really stuck, drop me an email and I’ll try to ferret out the recalcitrant link or cross out my entry in the above list!

Editor’s Note: Know of a neat resource that you think might be a hidden gem? Drop an email to UpFront@ngsgenealogy.org.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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17 June 2015

Are you properly preserving your family heirlooms?

As family historians we often become the keepers of invaluable family artifacts – documents, photographs, textiles and more.

Are we doing the best we can to make sure they are preserved for future generations?

Thanks to Craig R Scott and his Heritage Books FB page we learned about a great piece about preserving artifacts on The National WWII Museum New Orleans page.

Use the following guidelines to keep your historic memorabilia in the best shape possible. Here we cover general hazards to artifacts and specific techniques for preserving textiles, paper, photographs, metal, leather and wood.

The post starts out by summarizing the seven hazards to historic artifacts and not surprisingly the number one item listed is light, followed by temperature, humidity, pests, human beings (yes we are a hazard!), chemical reaction & air pollutants and inherent vice. I found the concept of inherent vice interesting since it wasn’t a term I had heard before. Do read about “how” these are hazards.

The post then goes on to summarize how you might best preserve the objects in your care.

As usual I also sought some more guidance, possibly inspired by a recent trip to the Beaufort NC Maritime Museum and the Blackbeard exhibit, I cam across a post Artifact Preservation on a Shipwreck Diving website. One assumes that most of our artifacts haven’t sat in a salt water bath for hundreds of years and have been a bit more loving stored and my objective was to find out if there are any special needs for ceramic and glass artifacts.

Fortunately, a couple of years ago, I took part in an event where you could meet up with a conservator/appraiser to ask about your family heirlooms. At the time I learned that what I brought were not terribly valuable monetary-wise though they still all hold a lot of sentimental value for me.

As part of that program, I did also learn how to best store my one textile item (an 1875 silk shawl) and implemented what I was told. Of course, after reading over the mentioned post, I now learn that there is more I should be doing if this shawl is to continue to exist for future generations ...

I guess I’d best turn my attention to the metal objects I have which are definitely NOT the shiny objects they once were ...

Editor’s Note: If you do a web search on preservation of artifacts, you can find many helpful websites. I have a tendency to look into resources created by museums and historical commissions. After all, this is a key element of their mandate and they have lots of expertise. Here are links to the Texas Historical Commission, Basic Guidelines for the Preservation of Historic Artifacts, and the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute Taking Care page.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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09 October 2014

FREE Book on Dating 19th Century Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, and Cased Tintypes

As family historians, we love photographs. Sometimes though we struggle to figure out who is actually in the photograph. To help us with that challenge, we often try to determine exactly when the photograph was produced.

If you are dealing with a 19^th century photograph, that task might be a little easier now that Sean William Nolan has written Fixed in Time, a FREE book. Here is his PR release ...

The book, "Fixed in Time", contains illustrations of hundreds of mat and case styles, identified by the specific years during which they were used. Many styles were used for only a brief time, allowing you to date some early photographs to within a year.

This has been a labor of love for the past two years, bringing together my interests in photography, history, and my skills as a programmer. The book is the fruit of extensive research, having located over 2,100 objectively dated photographs from 1840 to 1865. Other guides exist to help you date photographs, but they are not as accurate as mine, being based small data sets and conventional wisdom (which I have found is *usually* correct). My guide is, however, more focused, and does not discuss uncased images or photographs after 1870.

You can pick up a PDF of my guide by going to www.facebook.com/fixed.in.time.book. You don't need to be a Facebook member to do this.

This book is a work in progress; I plan to issue an update next year. You can help me make the next edition more complete and precise by letting me know of any objectively dated cased photographs you may have.

I have downloaded the book and it is full of images to illustrate all that he talks about. Makes me wish that I had some 19^th century photographs (well, I actually wish that anyway ) so that I could explore their history in the context of the photography techniques of the time.

Did the book help you narrow the time frame of when a photo of interest to you was created?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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30 July 2014

Retronaut -- the Photographic Time-Machine

Long time readers know that as much as I love maps, I also love photos.

I just learned about another photo site, Retronaut (FREE to join though you will need to register). It is self described by:

Retronaut is a photographic time machine.

It is a digital collection of tens of thousands of pictures from across the past, all with one thing in common - each one has the power to warp your sense of time.

Our team mines archives online and offline, unearthing pictures that seem not to belong to the time when they were created, that dissolve away the years like tarnish on a ring, that take our collective map of the past and tear tiny holes in it - holes through which we glimpse the real past lying underneath our map.

These are pictures that show not so much the past as they show “now” – but another version of now.

In the course of learning more about this site, I came across this article 'Retronauting': why we can't stop sharing old photographs. The article talks about our interest in old photographs and mentions another site HistoryInPix (link is to Pinterest page). A Google search on History + Pictures + Collections brought up a massive collection of such. So, as you research your ancestors, you might check to see if there are any image collections particular to the place and/or time of their lives.

For me, the interest in pictures (and maps) is that as a visual person, I love to “see” what the world was like as seen and experienced by my ancestors.

What is your favorite historic photo collection?

Editor’s Note: Old photograph collections are not a new topic for Upfront with NGS. Catch previous posts on the topic:

+ Historic Photos -- a neat way to "see" how people and places once were

+ Colorizing Photoshoppers Put a New Spin on Old Historical Photos

+ FREE Video Series -- Caring and Preserving Family Papers, Photographs and More

+ you can also “search” on Upfront with NGS + Photos or Photographs or Images and some “mini bytes” will show up

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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Follow NGS via Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter

09 June 2014

FREE Video Series -- Caring and Preserving Family Papers, Photographs and More

A series of tutorial videos has been produced by the [NC] State Historical Records Advisory Board and the State Archives of North Carolina with support by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. These provide basic information about the care and handling of family papers, regardless of where you live.

You can FREELY access these tutorial videos via YouTube. They each run about 10 minutes.

#1, Identifying and Protecting Essential Family Records

#2, General Paper Preservation Tips

#3, Caring for and Sharing Family and Personal Papers

#4, The Care and Preservation of Family Photographs

#5, Managing and Preserving Digital Images

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Follow NGS via Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.