The Joy of Scanning

A few days ago I rearranged my genealogy/computer room.  This also entailed rearranging the office supply closet.  With my scanner located very close to my desk, I began scanning documents and photographs.  This has been an on-going project for several years, but now close to the end, it becomes challenging and interesting. 

Having documents scanned, along with proper citations, certainly helps in trying to locate them and share them.  I have also located a number of photographs that needed scanning.  At some point in time my mother-in-law made photocopies of old photographs and shared those with me.  The quality is not good, but it's better than nothing.  My sister-in-law and I now wonder what happened to the originals.  Our next quest will be to locate them.  We hope they did not meet the fate that many old photographs do ... the dumpster. 

The joy of scanning documents is that my memory is refreshed about various lineages and this leads to more research.  I am not becoming distracted though, so the scanning will continue.  Another joy to this project is that it keeps me at home and saves on gas in the car!  

How safe are your documents?  Now is a great time to start scanning them.  I also recommend backing them up to CDs, DVDs or better yet an external hard drive.