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Family History Kids
Thank you to the staff of Reunions Magazine for mentioning my website that focuses on kids and family history. It appeared in the Feb/Mar/Apr 2010 issue ofReunions magazine. The current issue is online...
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Emory University Saves Rushdie’s Digital Data - NYTimes.com
Emory University Saves Rushdie’s Digital Data - NYTimes.com Here's a nice article on digital decay and what one archive is doing about it. Have you read the chapter on digital preservation in my...
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YouTube - Faces of the Feebleminded
If you've never watched Lorie Conway's DVD called Forgotten Ellis Island or seen the book, take a peek at this short video clip. The last time I was at Ellis Island some of these intelligence tests...
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What Children's Book Influenced Your Life? Your Responses
Theresa Berghoff wrote that A White Bird Flying by Bess Streeter Aldridge gave her an understanding of aging and death. It was a sequel to Aldridge's A Lantern in Her Hand. Rose Marie Morrell of A...
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A 160-Year-Old Photographic Mystery
I wrote about early color images in Family Tree Magazine in the March 2010 issue. Here's a story about Levi Hill, one of photo history's most intriguing people. He claimed to find a way to make...
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AIC: Caring for Your Treasures
A photograph can be one of many processes in which light-sensitive media are employed to create a visible image. The prevalence of photographs allows us to forget that they are potentially fragile...
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Night at the Museum Series: The Star Spangled Banner
For the Next 12 weeks I will be doing a blog post series based on the Star Spangled Banner. Stay tuned every Saturday for a new piece of the story provided by the Smithsonian.On September 14, 1814,...
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Do You Recognize any of the Men in this Photograph?
AN HISTORIC photograph has been discovered showing the workers who helped create one of North Yorkshire's most beautiful buildings.As a £150,000 English Heritage project to revive their work at Manor...
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Night at the Museum Series: The Star Spangled Banner
The War of 1812Although its events inspired one of the nation’s most famous patriotic songs, the War of 1812 is a relatively little-known war in American history. Despite its complicated causes and...
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Restoring Damaged Photographs
Unless you are extremely fortunate to have a collection in mint condition, at least a few of your family photographs will need to be professionally restored or conserved. There is a lot of confusion...
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Night at the Museum Series: The Star Spangled Banner
The Capital CapturedAngered by British interference with American trade, the young United States was intent on reaffirming its recently won independence. Instead, a series of defeats left Americans...
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Cased Images
At almost every lecture, someone approaches me with a question about a small box or book-like item they found in with the family photographs.If you have one or two in your collection, treat them with...
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Night at the Museum Series: The Star Spangled Banner
A View of the Bombardment of Fort McHenryPrint by J. Bower, Philadelphia, 1816. One of the soldiers who was in the fort during the 25-hour bombardment wrote, “We were like pigeons tied by the legs to...
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Night at the Museum Series: The Star Spangled Banner
A Moment of Triumph By the “dawn’s early light” of September 14, 1814, Francis Scott Key, who was aboard a ship several miles distant, could just make out an American flag waving above Fort McHenry....
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Night at the Museum Series: The Star Spangled Banner
Making the FlagIn the summer of 1813, Mary Pickersgill (1776–1857) was contracted to sew two flags for Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland. The one that became the Star-Spangled Banner was a 30 x...
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Paper Prints
All of us are familiar with paper prints. Every year we produce them by the thousands, documenting our family milestones and vacations. The paper prints of our ancestors and the ones we take today are...
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Photographic Albums
Our ancestors initially used plain paper albums to arrange their photographs with captions written underneath until commercially manufactured albums became available. These albums figured prominently...
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Weekend at the Museum: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918
World War I claimed an estimated 16 million lives. The influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people. One fifth of the world's population was attacked by this...
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Negatives Part 1: Glass
The history of prints corresponds to the development and history of the negatives used to produce them. After prints, negatives make up a significant part of our family photograph collection. But how...
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Weekend at the Museum: Photographic Fictions
Tampering with Perfection Photography was born pure. In the beginning, there was the daguerreotype. Each daguerreotype was made individually in the camera. No negative was used. Since photography was...
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