Category: Genealogy

Grandma with Bird

This photo was a bit of a salvage effort. The negative is pitch black, and even when I held it up to a bright light, I couldn’t tell if there was actually an image on it. I scanned it anyway, but the scan was black, too. I was able to bring up the image in Photoshop, but I had to make such extreme adjustments that the image quality suffered. Sometimes a bad photo is better than no photo at all, though, and I think this is one of those times. I love the way grandma is leaning over and rubbing grandpa’s head.

This was taken on their honeymoon, I believe.

I spent most of the day scanning more negatives. I love these two photos of my grandma.

My slide scanner (CanoScan 8800F) is kind of cantankerous. It was well reviewed, which is why I bought it, and for the most part it works great (can’t say as much for the software bundled with it, alas), but it has a couple of quirks.

The main problem is that I’ve been having trouble getting decent scans of negatives. I don’t know if it’s a hardware issue or something wonky with the software, but almost every time I scan a negative image, I get large, flat, grey areas within the image. I was about to send the scanner back, but I went ahead and tried scanning some 35mm slides. Those worked fine. Hmm. The only difference in the settings was that I was scanning the slides as positive images. So I tried scanning some of the problem negatives again, only this time as positive images, and they came out perfectly. Very odd! I just have to invert the images in Photoshop, which is no big deal.

Mert and Mel

And another one of my grandpa (left) and his brother, Mel (right). I’ve been trying for days to scan this negative!

I’ve been uploading old family photos to Facebook. I love this one of my grandpa.

This was my great grandfather, Louis Thompson. He and my great grandma Nell were divorced in the early 1930s. I’d never seen a picture of him before, but the last time I visited my grandparents, I went through my grandma’s old scrapbooks. She had a couple of photos of him, which I scanned. Grandma said he always wore white, and that he worked on an oil rig in the Gulf Coast.

Another shot of my great uncle Mel and his first wife, Darlene. It was probably taken around the same time as the last one, so 1948-ish. Aren’t they adorable?

My great-uncle and his wife, 1948

I believe this is my youngest brothers’ grandparents: Lillie Etta Shuman and Herbert Leslie Saxon.