Victory!

When I touched it - the presidency of the family reunion organization - I made sounds like "I plan to get a lot of documents out on the web."  Understand that the "organization" consists of me.  Myself and I.

So it's Winter and that's a good time to work on computery sorts of things.  Understand that not only am I the totality of the reunion organization, but I'm also a Luddite.

First attempt - Facebook.  I have a personal Facebook site but I basically don't do anything fancy/pretty with it.  I just know how to comment. The family site needs to be more/different than a personal site.  My first few attempts at fumbling around without knowing what anything meant resulted in me curling up in a fetal position and whimpering for several days.  But now I have A Book that Explains Things.  I'm feeling better.  I also realized I hadn't really thought out what content I wanted to get up there and that's going to be controlled right now by what I actually have at hand.

In addition to a box of old photos, I have the Reunion ledger in which things like who attended, deaths, meeting minutes, etc. have been recorded since 1949.  I've been wanting to scan it for a couple years so that the record will be preserved for the future if something happens to the ledger itself.  The hitch being that my scanner can only scan up to 8 1/2 x 11 pages and the ledger pages are longer than 11 in.  And I'm not popping for a large format scanner.  Nor did I want to pay someone else to scan 212 pages.  Don't know what it would cost but I bet I wouldn't like the bill.

So a bit of research on the web and I find Microsoft Image Composite Editor.  It has the magic price tag - it's free.  Originally developed for use in editing and merging panoramic photos, it really doesn't care whether it's a panoramic photo or not.  It just runs some amazing algorithm and seamlessly merges 2 images at a time.  Yay!

Its a slow process.  I have the.slowest.scanner.on.earth.  And I have to do 2 scans per page.  Then I have to run the 2 images through Composite Editor.  I also have to stop occasionally and do research on obituaries attached to pages.   Minutes and notes were not originally entered into the ledger and so I don't have lists of those who have died between reunions.  Just old newspaper clips.  Unfortunately, those clips aren't necessarily clipped between the correct years and none of them were dated.  Thank goodness for WV vital records and Find a Grave online.  And just enough info to be gleaned from sites like Ancestry.com that I can figure some things out.

Sandra Ann Whetsell, 1942 - 1950