Ancestry Magazine

What’s it like to let strangers into your files? Our guinea pig speaks.

It’s never fun being a guinea pig.

What I experienced in the last three weeks would normally be spread out over seven to eight months. I do not recommend the course I took. It was messy.

When Ancestry Magazine approached me with the idea of being digitized, I was hit by a mix of emotions. First and foremost, did I really need to be digitized? Was there something wrong with my current storage solution (boxes and files full of papers, miscellaneous packed-away artifacts, photos in albums)? What kind of commitment would I have to make for the project to be a success—an hour, a day, a lifetime? Would anyone other than me ever really care if my records were digitized? Would the magazine continue to call me their guinea pig?

I decided the only way I would find these answers was to take the project. I started by putting my audience first—the people I thought would one day benefit from my digitizing. I already knew where everything I needed was, and I understood how to work with my personal organization system. My family would probably want documents that were very easy to access. Their attitude about family history differs slightly from mine—they agree that it is valuable. They just tack on the words “not today.”

I also liked the idea of throwing in some challenges—my u nder-exposed and distressed microfilm copy of a Danish probate from 1689; a similar probate, but with half of the image in focus, the other half out of focus; a printout from a Danish website of family history titles and authors, with the extra diacritics—to test the OCR (the program says it handles Dutch, Spanish, French, and German—let’s see what it thinks of Danish); Super 8 movies taken in the 1940s and 1950s; and slides from the same era.

I started by organizing all of my photos into 2½-inch-high stacks, each of which would equate to approximately two hours work for the digitizers. I gathered papers, sifted through artifacts and mementos, and decided what was and wasn’t worth digitizing. After I was finished, my small house was in shambles.

Then the techs arrived and the project got underway. Over the course of the digitizing, I realized that a lot of good came from my effort and theirs. First, my photos are now labeled with at least educated guesses of people and years. As for the OCR and the indexing, they’re not quite done yet so I’m still waiting to see whether I can finally read the name of my sixth great-aunt in the 1689 probate.

My family came together for this project, and no one had to die for it to happen. A couple of my uncles volunteered collections that no one else was aware of. One of my sisters found items in a stack of Mom’s stuff that even Mom didn’t know about. Future generations of my family—kids and grandkids—got involved, and as they are more technologically driven than I am, they’re probably more apt to stay involved. These factors alone made the project worth it. But there’s more.

Thus far, the results that I’ve seen from the project have made me very happy. For example, I gave Acentra an extremely faded photograph—no faces were recognizable. After they worked on it for a few minutes, I could see and finally name every person in the photo, and I cou ld date it at about 1942. Also, it was much better having technicians come to my house rather than taking my collection somewhere, trusting that someone would handle my treasures in a manner I’d be okay with. I was part of this process. And if I chose to, I could watch over absolutely everything the technicians did. Guinea pig or not, it was worth the effort, despite the temporary shambles of my home.