Today was exciting. Yes, turning pages and digitizing can be very exciting – especially if you find you have made a mistake and you have to re-do the work…….which we did after doing 638 pages we discovered that somewhere in the setup of the camera, something had reflected onto the glass and was captured by the camera and put on the page as a white slash shape. The exciting part is that we found it before it was sent off to Salt Lake City for the adjudicators to find and then send back for a re-do. So we did find out some new things about the program and how to make it work for us so that our output will be better than it first was.
The books we are working with are more than 160 years old and are totally amazing to work with. Just to handle one is impressive and I am full of admiration for the bindery that put them together and see them still in one piece generally and not falling apart. We have digitized 7 of them so far…..4,000 + pages all told.
The pages of the books have lots of white spots on them and some smudging and I was thinking about that and trying to find what was causing this bleed through on the edges of the pages and causing spots on the rest of the page. Well, it turns out that they tried to do gilt edge on the pages but the pages seem to have absorbed the color and it has bled onto the page to about ½ inch in some places and you can see the sparkle of the gold on the page. I also discovered something else about these books. It seems that they are copies of proceedings of court cases and that they have been written onto separate sheets of paper and then they were stitched into this huge book at the bindery. I was impressed at first at the ability of the writer to keep such uniform letters and not have pieces scratched out or erased or re-done etc. and to do it in court when the accusations are flying across the room etc.etc. (I’ve seen Perry Mason in action!!!!!) The writing is unhurried, uniform, very readable and no spelling errors that I can discern with a quick look down the page. I came to the conclusion that they were transcripts when I saw a number of pages whose bottom notations are cut off and only half the writing remains. If it was a book that the writer had been using, nothing would have appeared to be cut off.
The books are also very, very heavy. We have to capture the picture of the spine of the book at the very beginning of the process. This means someone has to hold the glass up while the other one opens the book at the middle and place it face down on the cradle, lower the glass and capture the image. Then the glass has to be raised again and the book retrieved and then opened at the first page, have the camera take a template. The next thing is to do something called an LSI reading. This is a complicated process and when it is done, we can then begin to do the capture of the images. The more we do the preparation process, the easier it becomes…..but we are not perfect at it yet.
As I turn the pages and do the capture, I can see patterns of the organization of the writing there. There are lists of names on some pages that are the juror’s and other pages with lists on them have the heading “both Plaintiff and Defendant did not appear in court”. From time to time I catch glimpses of the court costs incurred – sometimes by the Plaintiff and sometimes by the Defendant – depends on who won the case. Saw an amount of $1.50 and a few pages later $500.00 and other amounts. In the mid 1850’s those were huge amounts of money. One Plaintiff pleaded that he was a good, honest, chaste, citizen and has never violated his marriage vows and he never did anything improper towards any female and hath been held and esteemed a man of good character and reputation and hath never been guilty or justly suspected of being guilty of adultery or other disgustful crime. The writing went on and on extolling his virtues and he testified that the defendant had uttered false, scandalous and defamatory remarks about him saying that the plaintiff was caught in the very act of adultery with………(name of the woman)…… but further perusal showed that the defendant came up with witnesses and dates and places and the plaintiff had to pay up. Oh and the crime was Adultery. This case would not even make it to the front door of the court house today now would it?
Through all this digitizing, along with the correct way of doing things so that a computer somewhere will organize it into some sort of coherent presentation, there has been a spiritual lesson. It is this – that exactness and honor are requisite in the performance of the digitizing so that researchers will be able to find their ancestor and get to know a lot more about them through the court cases. These cases contain family facts that may not generally be known or that had been colored with other paints to mask the shame of the criminal past. I suspect that some of these cases got buried altogether and when they are unearthed, there will be an Aha moment and the ancestor takes on a more believable form than the “butter would not melt in his/her mouth” representation that is commonly held in the family.
Another example of exactitude is the digitizing camera. We have to calibrate it exactly to achieve the crispness needed for folks to read the reports on the internet and it is parallel with the exactness we need to have in our lives to accomplish this mortal set of tests we face.
When I was given my commission by President Steven Campbell, he said to me that I would be inspired to seek other records that would be pertinent to these digitizing assignments. I was contemplating the first book that was digitized by us and it came to me that there had to be an index somewhere, but it was not in the room with the books. I asked the worker in the archives if there was such a thing as an index and he thought a minute and said, I will go and look, and he came back later with an index for each of the books. I feel sure that this was pure inspiration because the written agreement that is in place between the Archives and Family Search, did not mention about index books or even ask if there were any. How about that?
After all the heavy duty things connected with the digitizing, there are lighter moments that take place in the archives. There is a worker named Arthur (goes by Art) and he goes around singing. Today we found out that the phone in our room does not work and we asked Art and others to look at the problem so that we do not have to use our cell phone minutes to iron out the problems when we talk to our trainer. Well, when Art came in with Jeff, another worker there, the two of them were laughing and channeling Peter Sellars in his role as Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies of long ago. They both had us laughing even though we were ready to cry because we had just found out that we had to redo the 600+ pages. One good thing is happening, it takes a lot of effort to hold down the glass cover over the book and then click the camera – well my upper body is getting a workout.
The squatters are still on the capitol lawn living in ratty looking tents. In today’s paper there was a picture of them dismantling a wooden pallet to use to keep their tents’ from rising up due to the earth being very moist and getting ready for the winter season. I wonder how long they intend to stay there? There was a comment in the paper that some “truly homeless” folks had come to live with them – any port in a storm is a good port……but the squatters are not happy at being joined by the homeless people from the streets of Augusta.
There was a note in the paper about a man who died on Oct 1. His family has been going through his stuff in the storage locker he has had for about 20+ years and they found a body of a woman in the unplugged freezer . Rather like the fellow in Prescott who did the same with his wife. He claimed her body when she died and took her home and put her in the freezer until medical science finds a cure for her disease and she can then come back to life was his explanation. His daughter found her mother in the freezer – caused a big fuss in Prescott. They thawed the body, did an autopsy and found that she died of natural causes, and he was given the opportunity to take her somewhere and bury her. Story goes that he took her to Canada……………..now that is where she can become part of the permafrost and stay frozen forever. Just goes to show, we never know what is in a person’s freezer!
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