GENEALOGY RECORDS: Ohio Memory & Freedmen's Bureau (African-American Genealogy)

[Music] welcome to elevenses with lisa i'm lisa louise cook grab your favorite cuppa in your elevenses mug and let's talk about genealogy you know one of the great things about genealogy is that there's always new records well they're not really new records it's new old records and these records have sometimes been around for hundreds of years they may have been languishing in the basement of an archive a library or even a private collection and every day old records are becoming newly available and often available to us right from the comfort of our own home who doesn't love that and when we can get our hands on those records it just can throw open the doors to new possibilities our genealogy brick walls i think are just shaken in their boots because it just takes one record the right record to knock that brick wall down so today we're going to explore two major genealogy record collections and they are very unique and they have some two really very important things in common they're both online and they are both absolutely free now if your family has any connection with the state of ohio and sometimes i think it's hard not to find a family with at least one ancestor who made their way through the state then our first collection is going to be of great interest to you it's called ohio memory it's their collection and their website at ohiomemory.org but even if you don't have a direct connection with the state you know like all collections it's really worth taking a peek because records don't care about borders right so there might be something there that you are looking for and you need and uh like i said it's absolutely free so there's no reason not to go and check now ohiomemory.org was featured in the family trade magazine best 75 state genealogy websites in one of their recent magazine issues and as you may know i host the genie the family dream magazine podcast i've been doing that for over a decade now and uh so recently i had an opportunity to interview the digital services manager for ohio memory her name is jenny solomon and that was for the audio podcast but there is so much to see at ohio memory that i thought you know it just makes sense to show you the video interview here on the show today so let's dig in to ohio memory [Music] hi jenny hi thank you for having me well thank you so much for joining us you know because so many of our ancestors i think at some point passed through ohio and that makes the ohio memory website just a really important resource for many many people so tell us first and foremost who is behind who is ohio memory ohio memory is the collaborative digital library program of the ohio history connection and the state library of ohio it was actually established in 2000 so we're celebrating 20 years this year so it's nice to get an award in a year that was already exciting and significant for us initially it was established as a bicentennial project they wanted a way to capture some of ohio's history the ohio we know today turned 200 in 2003 um so they wanted to spend some time seeing how we could um capture ohio's history and share it more broadly so um that's how it started we basically not me specifically but we uh worked with institutions around the state to um they picked some of their favorite items in their collections we helped them digitize them and we put them online they're still there today um in the ohio memory collection on ohio memory which is a little bit confusing um but that's how it started it was just a online scrapbook was the vision and then it was we got some grant funding um through a couple different state organizations to support that and it was so successful that we continued to do work on the project after that initial round of funding um with a little bit more funding from some other um folks and then we were able to expand it even further right initial submission we had about 260 um institutions uh contribute over 13 000 different items well now you mentioned the institutions that are involved might correct that this is primarily library driven yes it's mostly libraries but we certainly have contributions from all different types of organizations so we have a lot of historical societies who participate um public libraries are probably our biggest participant but we have university libraries we have government institutions special libraries religious archives particularly if you're looking at the early phases of the program of the project we have great diversity in the organization types that were represented so we also have i think images from columbus zoo from botanical gardens lots of different uh things represented there everything ohio so for the genealogists who will be coming to ohiomemory.org uh they'll be excited to know what what kit do you have and and kind of how is it organized on the website what should they be looking for so um in terms of types of materials we have um coverage of early um well pre-history through present day so we have a lot of early statehood we have representation of our american indian predecessors we have civil war coverage world war one pretty much any big event you can think of in ohio any aspect of ohio history we have some sort of coverage on we have all 88 counties are represented there are photographs we have maps we have drawings paintings manuscripts and journals we have archaeological artifacts natural history specimens historical objects we have oral histories um so both audio and video there and we have lots of newspapers and we have lots of yearbooks and then through um primarily the state library's contribution we have a lot of like present day government records as well um because they're capturing some of the websites and um currently produced materials as well as historical so um it's kind of more of what don't we have and certainly there are things that we're missing and every year we're working to add more our partners are we are to add more to make sure that the story is as inclusive as it can be given the resources that we have available and are these digital you know items or are we going to run into lots of innocence water catalog listings but not necessarily available to view on the website what what's the nature of the items um everything is should be the full digital version of that item so for the newspaper it's the full newspaper issue keyword searchable same thing with other printed materials um we do sometimes connect back to other catalog records but if you're going to ohio member you're going to see the thing um that you're looking for as close as a representation as we can get to the real thing using digital technology fantastic and you said they're searchable and of course when you go to the home page first and foremost you do see the search box so do you have any kind of uh tips and recommendations for us to get the most out of using that yes so um a big tip for ohio memory is that when you're doing a search it's not only searching your keyword full text search um optical character recognition ocr data but also the metadata that every partner including the ohio history connection has added to the items to describe them so people can find them obviously if you're looking at a photograph there aren't going to be words you can search on so we have to rely on our own descriptions of them to find those materials so um it's important to pick a keyword that's relevant to your search and also a keyword that is accurate to the time period you're searching as well because depending on what the nature of the material is you might have to look at things a little bit differently particularly in newspapers words change over time location names change over time so that's something that we're trying to capture or we are capturing history as it happened but also trying to make sure that it's connected to the history of today so people can figure out those changes when you're on the homepage um probably the biggest tip um if you're mostly looking for visual items which i think is where a lot of people like to start because photographs are just um so much they're very exciting to see um all the things that have been captured over the years on the main page there's a little box that you can click that says exclude full text searches sources so when you do your search um and you do a search for dog or whatever you'll just get pictures and photographs back and manuscript materials and not necessarily get bogged down with thousands of pages of newspaper results which i personally love because i help with our newspaper digitization program the most but i know other people can get a little overwhelmed by it so that's one good tip to keep in mind is um restricting your format to what you want to do right from the home page oh that's a great great suggestion you mentioned the newspapers and of course um we think of chronicling america at the library of congress as a place to go to newspapers will we find the same collections or will we find some unique items at ohio memory ohio memory and chronicling america collections do not overlap so we have contributed quite a bit of content to chronicling america over the years and um we've focused our ohio memory contributions on different titles and different time periods so you'll find a lot deeper runs of papers on ohio memory you'll find more recent papers so we have some of our partners on the project have digitized their local newspapers up through 2019 and continue to add more content every year and then we also have some really early significant newspapers for ohio like the ohio state journal which was the paper of record for ohio during the 19th century so that we had that coverage from like 1830 through 1875 so a really important time period of ohio's growth and the civil war and then we also worked with another library to digitize one of the earlier papers in ohio the lebanon western star which is in southwest ohio near cincinnati um and kings island if anyone knows where that is great amusement park outside there um but that also covers some really great early ohio history from a more rural area in our in our state so there is not any overlap but they're all um kind of part of the same story building the same collection and so i think at last count we have hit about a million pages between those two websites of digitized newspaper content well that's exciting that there isn't the overlap and then there's that kind of a volume and you mentioned another exciting collection i think that interests people a lot which is yearbooks tell us a little bit about that so a lot of our partners particularly those public libraries that we work with have access to uh yearbook collections um through you know their partnerships with local schools and that's just one of the things that public libraries seem to um gravitate toward and so they've worked a lot of them have worked to digitize their materials and put them on ohio memory um some of them go back pretty early some of them are more recent generally you're not going to get anything past um kind of the mid-20s just because of privacy issues for minors but um yeah there's definitely a lot of good content from our northwest ohio partners and some northeast ohio partners with yearbooks and then some kind of student history from southwest ohio as well with a couple universities we have um participating in the program down there so i think there's yearbooks and sort of like um image images of students that aren't necessarily your books but just student pictures that kind of thing oh fantastic now the big question is it all free or are there some things that are our pay subscription the whole thing is free everything on ohio memory is free we used to have one collection that was behind a paywall but a couple years ago we opened that up that was the underground railroad wilbur h siebert collection which has a lot of great information about underground railroad activities in ohio and beyond and it's a really strong resource for people looking at research methods of the era where this was made and also kind of trying to dive into some of these stories of how um the underground railroad actually operated um and some of these stories were like kind of first and second hand but it's still very helpful to know but we opened that up a couple years ago um in celebration of black history month and just kept it open because we really want people to have access to those resources so everything on ohio memory is free well that's what we like to hear wow what an amazing resource anything i didn't ask you about that you feel like our genealogy listening audience would be excited to hear about um gosh i mean there's just so much in ohio memory that um i really just encourage people to just check it out and see what they can find you may not find things specific to your family history but sometimes you look at it as as kind of coloring in those black and white photos with just getting more context around the community that your families were in and the world they were living in so even if it's not a story about like your uncle who did something cool at this time it could be you're like getting a greater understanding of what life was like um back then um and recently we've put together some help resources on our website um we have a few videos and some um just like an faq and some like kind of search guides to help people really um learn how to dive in because um it is google-like but sometimes if you're really trying to do more complicated searches or trying to find something very specific it's nice to have those tips on hand so we're trying to make sure that information is available for our users so that they can do that as much as they can on their own but also we're available via email to help too wonderful wonderful well it's a it's a tremendous resource we're very fortunate uh that that you guys have it what have you got coming in the future is there an ongoing digitization process or other things in the works yeah so the way the program works now is um the ohio history connection the state library of ohio continually digitize and add materials to ohio memories so every year ohio history connection staff look at our collecting um initiatives and our strategic goals and trying to figure out what um collections we have in our archives that we could digitize and expose to the public so this year we focused on um harding president harding since it's the 100th anniversary of his election and um so we have a brand new warren g harding collection online um that we're adding more and more content to regularly kind of documenting his campaign and the other materials we already had online so we continually add content and then our partners we have about 40 active partners around the state who are also choosing from their own collections of materials to digitize so wood county um up in northwest ohio has been celebrating there by sunny bicentennial i believe this year or around now um so they've been adding content um mount st joseph university and the sisters of charity in the cincinnati area have also been celebrating an anniversary within the last year or two so they've been adding a lot of content documenting documenting the history of their communities and their residents and so it's just every you know every month new things are added and we get new partners every year and it's really exciting to see it expand and let people have the um let people be able to choose what they want to represent their community and we love being able to support that and give them an outlet to do that since digitization isn't cheap and it isn't super easy so we try to make we're trying to help lower those barriers as much as we can so that they can share their information and other people can get to it that's great and a final question you know many genealogists will be looking to kind of help supplement their own family stories and i think that that's where a website like yours comes in so handy because it's going to have some of the the greater wider context what are some of the parameters they should keep in mind around usage and copyright oh great question so generally speaking um most of the materials on ohio memory are available for educational use without needing extra permission so if you're a family historian and you are wanting to put a picture in a presentation for your family you just want to keep it as part of your own research records that's fine um we don't need um there's any sort of monitoring for that um and if you want to post something on facebook or another social media account we just ask that you link back to us so people who look at it know where they can find whatever you found and also find out where they can get more just like it if they're interested in it um but anything beyond that like if you had a formal publication um and uh yeah basically in kind of formal publication you would need to reach out to us to go through our rights and reproduction system and we do um there are things that are in public domain ohio memory but there are plenty of things that are not in public domain it's really a mixed bag of material so it all requires a little bit of digging into but i would say in most cases for genealogists there aren't a lot of barriers for them accessing the content and reusing it in a way that's standard for genealogists for kind of local presentations and sharing with family and that sort of thing fantastic well it's a wonderful resource it's ohiomemory.org and you've been hearing from jenny solomon who is the digital services manager thank you so much jenny it's been a pleasure thank you [Music] thank you so much to jenny solomons for joining us here what a terrific website uh just to recap she mentioned that they have records pertaining to the civil war to world war one um maps drawings photographs journals oral histories both audio and video oral histories and tons of yearbooks i went digging through the yearbooks and found all kinds of stuff and of course they have some present day records as well now i want to also remind you about jenny's search tip because i think it's really important remember everything is digital and keyword searchable on their website so you can use that search box on their home page and it's going to search both the text of the item itself because they have ocr and the metadata but if you just want to see picture items visual items there's a little check box it's called exclude full text sources that's the box that you want to check when you put your keywords in the search field and then you will only get items that you can look at visual resources so here's wishing you loads and loads of genealogy gems over at ohiomemory.org let's head over to chat and see how you're doing i saw a question pop in asking about if they had german newspapers now i know that chronicling america does for ohio certainly there's a large german population in ohio i believe they do as well i think it's just it's so simple to go over there and search go check it out and try if you know the title of a newspaper then that would be even faster to go and search for that um and also you might try searching in german so you could go to google translate put in a couple of keywords that you have a particular interest in get those converted over into german and then try them in the search engine over at ohiomemory.org you never know what you'll find uh let's see what else is going on i gotta make my screen here a little bigger so i can see what you're saying okay i saw lots of people talking about um using the yearbooks and those are fantastic it reminded me a lot of looking through the internet archive in terms of the search ability and being able to view things and download things and it was just fantastic images do they have anything on criminal records or prison records linda i don't know about that i didn't actually look for that what i did notice was in the filters on the left-hand side there's lots of different subject types even if you find that criminal records is one of them look through all of them what's interesting is it's human beings right that put items into digital collections and sometimes they end up creating a new tag or a new subject that's just a little bit different than the other one so don't assume whether it's criminal records or newspapers or yearbooks or whatever that there aren't other tags and other subject headings that are really similar that fall in the same category that you're going to want to catch look all the way through that filtering system and then of course if you've got some specific things in mind whether it's people's names or a particular court case you could search for that as well so i would think particularly with criminal records you're going to want to switch that up a little bit and try a couple of different variations on the search all right um well we're gonna get into our next record collection here um which i'm really looking forward to let's just dig right in well family search is always busy with new and exciting records that they're bringing to genealogists and the freedmen's bureau records are certainly in that category so today i have invited the deputy chief genealogical officer of family search tom reed to join us and talk about the freedmen bureau records and the website and everything else that we need to know to to make the most of these records welcome to the show tom thank you thank you so much for having me this is exciting well you're always a busy guy i know when when we see each other at conferences you're always busy you've been busy this week you've been uh working with going to slig the uh salt lake institute of genealogy right correct correct i'm i'm in this the week-long the second week of slick this year um where we're doing in-depth african-american genealogy so i've already seen in the first two days references to friedman bureau records and how they've been so instrumental for helping people that i you know i'm ready to talk awesome so they've been on your mind definitely and of course you were really involved in that project but i don't want to jump too far ahead let's help bring everybody together and say uh let's start at the beginning which is good in case somebody hasn't heard of these records before tell us what the freedmen's bureau was so the freedmen's bureau was established shortly after the civil war to help those newly freed enslaved individuals and poor white southerners kind of get back on their feet or or start a new start afresh and so in 15 states in the district of columbia they got the the department of the army actually established these friedman bureau field offices and and local offices where if people needed assistance in any sort of way they could come and seek help right and so many african-americans you know who had been formally you know had been enslaved now were on their own and they needed you know work and they needed food and they needed you know housing and things like that and so they came to the bureau seeking support and the government was there to kind of help them and during the course of that help and administering that help the government kept great records and sometimes the first records of african americans in this country because many had not been documented before if they had been documented it had been in wills and probates in the state files where it might have only been a first name or or something like that as as part of property not as citizens of the united states and so you know from it it operated from 1865 to 1872 um and after and and kind of you know went out of um out of operation it was hard to maintain right on that kind of a large scale and and so there's some other programs and things that happened after that and hopefully and in many instances state governments took up you know the responsibility and and carried on the work of the freedmen's bureau and so it was that kind of seven year period where they were in very much operating and helping people all across the south wow so certainly it's a wonderful resource for african-american research you also mentioned that there were some i'm imagining people who kind of lost everything in the war or southern um native americans maybe we're going to find kind of a mix of people in their records you you will you will find many it was called the bureau of refugees friedman and abandoned lands oh that's the actual organization name we've shortened it to friedman's bureau but that that says a lot refugees freedmen and abandoned lands and so that tells you who they really tried to serve as anyone who had those needs who were refugees were they freedmen were they you know did they have their lands confiscated and they needed to get their lands restored to them and that maybe was some of the case with some of the white southerners at the time as well so you will find a variety of ethnicities these are not african-american only records but you do see a lot of african americans who are documented in these records and that's why it's so so helpful absolutely well and as we talk about here on the show a lot that uh any time our ancestors interact with the government you know records get generated and that's what you were talking about with these and i think uh you mentioned and i think this is really important for anybody doing research is to realize this may be the first time we see first and last name for some of these free people isn't that true absolutely you know there's one um a friend of mine reached out to me wanting help and was able to find her you know formally enslaved ancestor for the first time with his full name in a labor contract uh in in arkansas and so that was for her that was like wow this name had carried through you know to her family even till today but to see where the origin of that name was and then to find out that the origin of that surname actually comes from the person who enslaved her ancestor as well but but that name has carried through and that she was able to find that name for the first time in the friedman bureau records would it be safe to say that these types of records and we'll talk about some of the types of records that it generated but with these friedman bureau records um potentially help people kind of get past that wall we tend to hit in african-american research yeah absolutely the 1870 brick wall as as it's kind of known as these form a bridge if you will and and in many instances allow people to break through that brick wall this is exactly the situation that i'm talking about where now you've identified someone in the friedman bureau record who has a labor contract with a former you know planter and now you see this connection in this relationship that you had no idea about coming in 1870 because all you saw in 1870 is the household in the census and you don't know the relationship between those people who live near them from the census record alone but now looking at the friedman bureau records you see these relationships that start to to give you a sense of direction and give you some hypotheses and things to to further your research hopefully to get further you know back and and identifying those ancestors oh you can see why they're so important tell us okay so what kinds of records are we talking about what were there a variety of different records or was it like one this is your document they did they did everything so there's there's you know like i said there's labor contracts there's apprenticeship records which was different than kind of a labor contract um they solemnized marriages in many cases it was illegal to marry so now they're you know the bureau officers are sitting with this couple saying how long have you you know been married and how many children do you have and documenting that their education records so they started freedom in schools and they listed the children that attended those schools there's hospital records many were getting health care for the first time their court documents there's records of complaints you know and and grievances that happen in the area their ration records um where you know they appealed to the bureau for food and things like that um so this really runs the gamut like you said in any way that they interacted with the government during this time it was documented in these records the majority though really was correspondence between the bureau officers themselves and the state and federal um offices so there's a lot of communication and records where it's just transactional and talking about like it may talk about it may not be the records i'm i'm talking about the various types we're all kind of the genealogical relevant you know ones but there's so many others that also have additional information on individuals in them like a letter from a commissioner to another one saying hey we serve this family today they're going to be moving we want to make you aware and so here's a letter from one you know assistant commissioner to another assistant commissioner well that gets me thinking about now i know you put that project together was it back in 2015 2016 where you were getting these records digitized making them available right so when you're i'm thinking about some of this correspondence um as you were going through that process were you able to extract who they were talking about or will people need to kind of dig in and just read it all for themselves and hope that they see something there's there's two sides to kind of this you mentioned the friedman's bureau project which we kicked off in in 2015 and finished in in 366 days actually where we did we we kind of took from the records those genealogically relevant pieces and and and kind of put them in a project where we people could index those digitized images and now make those searchable and so that that part of it made searchable one million seven hundred and eighty three thousand 463 names right and so that that's the searchable name part but there's also pages and pages and pages of documentation that are still unindexed many people ask did you do all the freeman bureau records no we didn't do all of them because we didn't do a lot of that correspondence where there still is some genealogical nuggets and and breakthroughs that can be had and so you'll have to use you know the finding aids and the descriptive guides and pamphlets and go through and kind of look at those images all of the all those images are available online to view but not all of them have been indexed and so it will take some some research help and and really spending the time in these records to get the most out of both sides that's interesting and i love that you mentioned finding aids because i think those are so key if we understand the collection then we can better understand how to access it so let's talk about access i know familysearch.org was such a driving force in all this and you have the just is it discover friedman.org correct do they start should they start there or should they just go straight to familysearch.org is there a difference it depends on what you want to do and what you know right and so for many people just getting into the database and understanding what it has going to discover friedman.org and seeing if you're if you know you have for example an ancestor that was in the 18 cent that was enumerated in the 1870 census you may want to go to discover freedman.org and see if there are friedman bureau records for that ancestor and that's a great way to start the way it works on that website is actually you just put in a name a first name and a last name not even a location and it will search all the indexed collections that we have available including the friedman bank records which was a separate entity in the friedman's bureau and i can talk about that in a second but it'll search all of those record collections together and then it will let you know where where that name appears and and and lets you kind of scour through that and that's one kind of way to do it and many people do that we we don't promote it very much anymore since the project's been over but we still get lots of traffic lots of people who are searching for their ancestors on discover friedman.org but then you can also if you know the locale or if you know the specific type of record that you're looking for you can go on familysearch.org and just like you would you know search our searchable record database and browse our published collections you can get into individual collections there and start to do some research and so that's usually if you have a lot more clues on who you're looking for and you're looking for a specific type of record would be good to start at familysearch.org but if you don't know we always you know say go ahead go to discoverfreeman.org and and put in the name and see what comes up and so searching there is really dedicated to just that collection but like you said family search would be for those who want to use more the filters more the other search fields to kind of mix it up okay absolutely i heard you mention banking records is that right tell us what they are and how they differ so the friedman's bank was a separate entity in the bureau based in washington dc and allowed again after the war the civil war those those blacks who had money to actually deposit those funds into a bank account and and actually start to establish and accumulate some kind of wealth and it operated a little bit longer than the bureau from 1865 to 1874. it was not the same it was the friedman's you know friedman savings and trust bank i believe is the the official name of it um and there the the interesting thing about their depository records is to be a depositor you had to put information about your family about where you lived and so in this case you have whole family groups that are listed on a depositor's application to get a bank account with the friedman's bank and so you have a husband and wife and all their children where they lived in some instances it has who they were formerly enslaved by as well in those depository records from the friedman's bank unfortunately due to mismanagement and some other financial issues they they you know closed and kind of crashed and and went away but those records remain again the government you know national archives and records administration has been the ones who have held those records for years and we actually indexed those back in 2001 so the friedman bank record collection which is over 400 000 names for her i think 469 000 names are in that specific collection database have been available since 2001 available on familysearch.org but we kind of bring all of those together on that discover friedman the freedmen's bureau and the freedmen's bank and so we search all of those records together did you say those are index only so where would people get access and images images and images and images wow yes yes wow well it just you know i know i got a big smile on my face when i heard you say and they had to tell about the family because that's what you want to hear when it comes to records like that absolutely wow what a wealth of information and how amazing that family search and you partnered with a lot of different organizations didn't you to kind of bring that together yeah yeah national archives obviously was the partner they held the digitized images for us and and we also partnered with the national museum of african american history and culture so at the time was opening in 2016 and and we as a gift to the museum and working in collaboration with them gave them the database from the friedman's bureau project and so now if you go to that museum in washington dc you can actually go search on there they have a center for family history the robert frederick smith explore your family history center on the second floor of the museum and you can go there and you can search family search you can search the database that we gave them you can even search on ancestry again one of our good partners and friends um and and do some genealogy there and connect to these records there we also partnered with with several societies the largest being the afro-american historical and genealogical society and several of their chapters at the time i think there was 35 chapters across the united states and their society members helped push a lot of those indexing projects along and and was just extremely helpful in doing that it's amazing what can get accomplished when you pull together and how family search is able to um pull together some wonderful volunteers to make i mean you did this in record time it's really something we had 25 550 volunteers that helped us with this project and and like i said done in 366 days i say 366 because just a little we're trying to get it done in a year and i remember that june 19th of 2016 was a sunday and so i didn't get the report for the completion of the project because we weren't in the office until monday morning and so i couldn't say that we finished it on sunday because i didn't have a definitive record that showed it so 366 days 1 million 781 463 names from that project with those 25 550 volunteers and and i i think every like i i can't thank enough people right because there were so many who were involved who who have made this possible family search maybe you know have been the facilitator and tried to organize this but really without the help of volunteers and and you know your listeners and viewers and folks who really are dedicated to this we wouldn't have this treasure trove of records that we have today so thank you very much to anyone who's listening or watching this i'm sure there are many who probably participated in wow what what a treasure trove thank you so much for coming here today and sharing with us about these amazing records i know everybody will be uh interested to take another look for themselves at discoverfriedman.org or familysearch.org tom it's always great to hear from you and see you thank you so much good to see you too thank you for having me and i hope this again helps individuals break through that brick wall and discover and connect with their families i'm sure it will [Music] thank you so much to tom reed now he mentioned a couple of important websites discovering your african american heritage and most importantly family searches freedmen's bureau project website that's at discoverfriedman.org it's kind of a great portal to all the records over at family search but of course family search is a great place to go as well familysearch.org everything there is absolutely free and this show is free and i will have detailed show notes for you over at genealogygems.com just click elevenses in the menu over there and you will get the detailed notes those will be coming out in just a day or so after this video is complete our live show here but of course check down in the video description as well for this video to get all the details on how to get connected with us and if you haven't already signed up for the free newsletter please do that because that's the best way by far to stay connected with me so that i can let you know about the new shows that are coming out both the podcasts and the videos and i don't know what happened there i had an elevens with lisa just flying across the screen on his face tom is such a good guy he'll understand a little video editing glitch there speaking of uh video editing i thought i would share with you just a little project i was working on so yesterday was st patrick's day here and um i was looking through my photographs of course of my irish ancestors which if you have been a 11's with lisa viewer then you know i've been working diligently on my irish brick wall we made some huge progress in episode 18 of 11's with lisa and anyway my my ancestor who kind of made the journey my great great grandmother was margaret scully and she married michael lynch and so i found this old photograph of her back in the 1920s now margaret was born in the 1840s she immigrated in the 1850s and i just wanted to see what i could do using kind of a collection of tools in my tool kit for photo editing and video editing and here's what i came up with [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's amazing i get anything done i love i love playing with old photographs that was so much fun so okay so what that was was i have discovered that when you're using that myheritage the colorization and the enhancer and all that if you bring the photo in already somewhat restored it makes a huge difference particularly if you're one of the 50 million people who have been or i don't know how many they've had 50 million uploads of that deep nostalgia the animation um it's not near as good if you haven't done a little bit of the restoration we get those kind of mold spots those dark spots are like mold on the photographs tears you know all kinds of things that are wrong with the original image and those all go into the animation so i just used my phone and the free adobe fix it's adobe photoshop fix app and that's a free app and you can bring the photo onto your phone and and do some restoration you want a really high resolution image so that you can really zoom in and get in there and fix things but i found that fixing the kind of the tears in the image some of the spots and the markings things that just kind of mess things up getting that done first and then taking it in even then my heritage is an enhancer enhanced it even further and then we did to colorization that we did to animation and with all of that i used a program called camtasia and i'm gonna have a link to that in the show notes to kind of super trans transpose is that what i'm gonna call it to lay the photograph that was done on top of the animation so it kind of came to life and kind of zoomed in and zoomed out so lots of different tools but it was fun to see how they could all work together and i love that we're all here together every week i know that with some of the video interviews um i'm at the mercy of zoom and so it's only as good as one the camera that we're working with but then zoom's translation of the camera and then the video rendering and then putting it out over live stream so i'm working on that to see if i can find other alternatives to get a sharper picture that maybe can get around zoom and do something else so we'll be working on that but as always i hope that you picked up something new today something that you're excited about going and trying a genealogy gem because that's what we're all about here visit me at genealogygems.com slash elevenses we'll get you straight to the show notes and of course many of you are premium members i hope you're a premium member be sure and head to the resources section of the show notes page to download your ad free pdf cheat sheet of everything that both of my guests talked about today including also some of the techniques i used on the video editing so that's available for you in the resources you can learn more about premium membership at genealogygems.com as well and these videos are here free at our youtube channel i sure hope you'll subscribe and over a period of time they kind of pile up and so we move some of those and archive them exclusively for premium members well have a wonderful week stay safe we just had a huge storm here in texas but i see the sun is shining so there's some gardening to do and some genealogy to do have a wonderful week i'll talk to you next week bye [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems

Views: 1,838

Rating: 4.9540229 out of 5

Keywords: lisa louise cooke, elevenses with Lisa, genealogy gems, Genealogy podcast, free genealogy webinar, lisa louise cook, geneology, family history, how to find ancestors, genealogy how to, genealogy research, ohio history, ohio genealogy, freedmens bureau, african american genealogy, thom reed, familysearch, ohio memory, genealogy records

Id: FRaO5TuYUbk

Length: 52min 32sec (3152 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021