Archive for the “Photographs” Category

When the grandmother of one of my clients was born there was no father listed on the birth certificate. When she married she stated her father to be a Charles Johnson, but there was no other evidence of this, or indeed of any link between Charles and and the mother Isabella Staader.

At least there was a name to go on, and the place where the child was born. A search of the digitised newspapers on Trove had given a short account of a trial in which Charles was convicted in January 1887 of assault and sentenced to 12 months hard labour at Tamworth Gaol. The woman he assaulted was Isabella Staader.

Sydney Morning Herald 1st Feb 1897 p.5

Further searches revealed more information. The NSW Police Gazettes reported his arrest (without bail), sentence and release. He is the Return of Prisoners, showing his sentence:

Charles is about half way down. He was charged with “Wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm” on Isabella Staader. He was tried at Tamworth Quarter Sessions on 29th January 1897, and sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour at  Tamworth Gaol.

Later in the same year he appears in a list of Prisoners Discharged to Freedom. The printing is even smaller than in the page above so I haven’t posted an image. It describes not only his crime, sentence and date and place of trial, but some additional information – his native place was Tamworth, NSW; year of birth was 1862; height 5 feet 5 inches; fresh complexion; brown hair and eyes; regular nose, mouth and chin; and this was his first conviction.

The Index to Gaol Photographs on the State Records NSW website does not include those taken at Tamworth Gaol, but there is a full index at the Western Sydney Records Centre. There he was: Charles Johnston in Tamworth Gaol. The presence or absence of the T in the name was a minor inconvenience – if they didn’t always spell names the same way there is no reason for us to be pedantic about it.

SRNSW: Department of Corrective Services, Photograph Description Book, Tamworth Gaol, 1894-1929.

The page is wrinkled where the photographs have been stuck on.  We now know quite a lot more about Charles Johnson, including some more accurate information, as I suspect the Description Book is more accurate than the Police Gazette. He had light brown hair and blue eyes, with a cut under his left eye. He weighed 130 pounds. He was Church of England and he could read and write.

We may not know exactly what was going on between Charles and Isabella, but we now have an idea of when it might have come to an end. Perhaps she took him back when he got out of gaol; certainly his child knew that he was her father.

Often the father of an illegitimate child can never be found. Sadly, if there was domestic violence, it may be possible to find out quite a bit about him.

The full citation for the page from the Description Book is :

State Records NSW: Department of Corrective Services, ‘Photograph Description Book, Tamworth Gaol, 1894-1929’, [3/5997]; item 49 for Charles Johnson.

The square brackets seem to interfere with the formatting in the picture caption.

At the recent Family History Conference at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City Barry J. Ewell held a session on using your digital camera and scanner for family history research. He shared some of his secrets with the participants, and I think they are worth repeating here for an Australian audience.

Digital camera

1. Ideally your camera should have between 5 and 8 megapixels, and a wide-angle lense. This gives the best possible detail without making the files too unwieldy to use. The wide-angle lense enables both pages of a book to be photographed at once. If you are shopping for a camera I would also add a “document” setting or similar that allows you to turn the camera on and start shooting without having to adjust the flash and macro settings every time – I wish mine did this!

2. Take images of the pages of a book, instead of using the photocopier. Barry uses a small desk tripod and takes the book over near a window. I’ve found that a window isn’t always available, but if you position yourself so that you don’t get a shadow from the light behind you you should be OK. Don’t use the flash – it’s damaging to old documents, annoying for other patrons, and creates a glare in the photograph.

3. Use photo software to brighten up the photos of the pages. Auto-contrast adjustment makes the page whiter and the printing darker, which is what you want. Barry uses Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is relatively inexpensive. I use PaintShop Pro, a similarly-priced application that is, in my opinion, easier to learn, although these days I often use Google’s Picasa or the Picture Viewer that came with Windows Vista for this brightening up task – it’s quicker and easier to scroll through each photo and fix it, although the Windows Viewer doesn’t create a backup of the photograph.

4. Use a metal cookie-sheet and magnets to hold curling pages or photographs down. He has a metal sheet to which he has stuck white shelf-liner paper to give a white background, then uses magnet strips from a craft store to hold down the document or photograph. I can see this working well for pages from a probate packet and I’m keen to try it!

5. Take overlapping photos of large documents and then stitch them together. Large documents such as maps, architectural drawings, or even old wills, can be photographed in overlapping sections. You can then stitch the sections together at home with your photo editing software. This works well as long as you keep the sections the same – make sure you have the camera the same distance from the document each time.

Scanner

1. Use OCR software to scan a document into editable text. Optical Character Recognition software turns printed text documents into an editable document in Word or similar that you can cut and paste into your own document. The quality of the recognition varies with the quality of the document – old newspapers are tricky, new books are fairly straightforward. I’ve used this to scan copies of old electoral rolls for a district into a spreadsheet, and although I had a lot of checking and fixing to do, it was much quicker and easier than typing the whole thing out!

2. Use dark backing paper to scan a document that has bleed through from the other side. If you are able to scan a document that has the text on the reverse side showing through you can put black construction paper behind (on top) of it when scanning. This blocks the text on the other side. I have some prime examples of this, which unfortunately I had to photograph rather than scan, but it’s a neat trick!

You can read Michael De Groote’s full article about this presentation on the Mormon website here.

Not directly related to genealogy, perhaps, but you might be surprised by how useful these programs can be.

Mindmapping

Mindmapping is a way of organising information or ideas. It is fantastic when when you are at the planning stage of a project for getting all your ideas down and organised. It’s very helpful for making decisions – you can get all the information you need down, all the fors and againsts, and everything becomes clearer. I don’t know why it works better than writing straight lists, but it does. I used to use it at university to plan essays. In those days I used pencil on a large drawing pad, or A3 paper. These days I use computer software, which allows changes and rearrangement more readily than pencil on paper.

There are a lot of different packages around, and after trying out a few I decided on Mindmeister. It is web-based, allowing collaboration with others, and it can also run off-line, which is quicker. The basic version is free to use and has limitations such as the number of mindmaps you can have at any one time. The premium version is a reasonable yearly fee that works out to something like $4 per month and allows unlimited mindmaps and offline access. Another free mindmap application, not web-based, is Freemind.

Photo albums

There are a lot of picture-hosting sites around that allow you to upload albums of photos to share with others. I use Picasa, one of the growing Google family of applications. I’ve mentioned Picasa before. It allows public sharing, which means anyone can see it, or private sharing, which involves a long key in the filename which you give to people you want to share it with.

This is a great way to share photos with relatives. You upload the album once, add photos as you wish, and send the link to your relatives. When you find a new cousin you can just send the link instead of sending photos as attachments. They can download the photos, and even though they may not be the same quality at least they have them and they can never be lost completely. Picasa is completely free.

Time tracking

Another web-based application I use is Harvest, to track my time and account for it. I create projects and tasks and start the timer when I am working on them. It also has an invoicing option. Although I started using it primarily for client work I also track my own genealogy research and general time-wasting. It is a very interesting exercise to do this for a week or two and find out exactly how much time you spend. Harvest has a number of monthly pricing packages.

A slightly different form of time-tracking that I’ve been experimenting with is RescueTime. This tracks exactly what you are doing on your computer – websites and applications – and gives you a list with time against each one. You can categorise them however you want; for example, I have MS Outlook and Gmail categorised as “email” and it is quite startling to see how long I spend in these applications every day. I can also set goals with warnings, so I can get a warning after I spent more than my allocated hour on email. I can also give each category a priority, from which my daily productivity is calculated. RescueTime is free.