Category: Uncategorized

I Tried Out AncestryPreserve and This is How it Went

Note: I was not asked to do this, I didn’t receive any compensation to do this. It’s just my own money, trying out this process and seeing how it went. I expect nothing in return for writing this review.

The initial kit was $20 when I purchased it. It comes with a variety of plastic bags and some bubble wrap to protect your items. The instructions were simple. Just pack up your items and send them back in the box provided. You are free to put an AirTag or comparable device in the box for added reassurance. I didn’t feel the need for that, but I can understand if some do, it’s a big practice in trust to send such valuable items.

The box you are sent to send back has the tracking number that you are able to track the box back to Ancestry and they give you a tracking number as soon as your items ship back. An AirTag would provide extra comfort to keep a 24/7 eye on your items.

Lets Get Started

I started to sort my slides and that was a task to say the least. There is a very faint date on most of the slides edges. This isn’t going to be when they were taken in most cases, but when it was processed or “developed.” It gives me a general timeline in any case. The next problem I have, is that I have to decide if I’m just sending them all or if I’m going to send a smaller batch of the better images.

The thing about the slides is they start with William and Llewellyn’s vacations and parties. They evolve to my Grandpa Moore and his second wife’s vacations and parties. I’ve digitized most of these slides once already using the Wolverine F2D Digital Converter. I’ve noticed though, these slide scanners don’t always get the whole image. My goal was to make sure I have high quality scans of William and Llewellyn’s group photos so I can possibly identify more people in them.

It took some time to figure out which ones I wanted to send and which I didn’t. Once I did I put them in ziploc bags to send them in the box. For reference, the usual storage boxes for the slides is in the bottom portion of the picture. I didn’t even send half but my count was 190 slides sent for digitization. The price per photo is 49 cents. Once I was sure that was all I wanted to send, I closed up the box and dropped it off at a UPS store to get it back to Ancestry and I waited.

In the timeframe of this whole process, I started having some computer issues. Looks like a new computer is in store for me soon. Which isn’t bad since my last one was purchased in September of 2013. 😂 The computer issues had me tracking my order on my phone, so that’s why there aren’t any computer screenshots, just ones from my phone.

I was notified by email and in the Ancestry app that my kit had arrived and that my quote would be ready soon. July 1st, I was scheduled to leave for a week long visit to Ohio. The morning of the 1st, my quote came in and I missed getting a screenshot of it. 😂 This is what happens when you check your email at 6am.

There were 5 slides not in the quote, I’m not sure why, but we will revisit that in the end. I opted for the AI-enhancement. Since I’ve digitized the slides already before, I wanted to see how much the enhancement would do for the slides. I didn’t get a screenshot of how much the enhancement added but if you divide $118.40 by 185 you get 64 cents. So about 15 cents per slide for enhancement. I will say the pricing I am talking about is just for photos. Film and Audio have their own pricing! Be sure to not blurry eye accept your quote at 6am without being sure of what you are reading. 😂

Then all I could do was wait… but not long.

The Results

I was sitting on my cousin’s couch the next day, checking my emails for the first time since I left home, and I had already received notice that my digitization was complete! When I logged into my email to check the timing, On July 1st at 6am, I finalized the quote. By 3:30pm the same day, my files were ready to view! Wow!

I was able to get a screenshot on my laptop now that I’m home. The albums were created by the organization I setup with my ziploc bags. They told you when you received the box that they aren’t able to put things in order for you, but they can keep the organization you set up by using albums. I would suggest putting some thought into that if you are sending a bunch of items like this.

One Downside

One thing I am currently having problems with, is tagging people in the photos. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve tried on my phone in the app, and I tried on my laptop. Before this project, I didn’t do a lot of work in the galleries. Usually one photo at a time uploaded to someone’s profile. I noticed it will let me tag people in general in the photo, but it’s not recognizing when I try to use the Who is this person? that pops up for facial recognition.

For example, on this picture of my father and his brother, Stevie, I used the Who is This? to tag them in the photos. However, it does not recognize that I’ve already identified them, but they are tagged in the photo. Just today, I untagged them and tried using the Who is This again and that worked. So maybe its a glitch that has been worked out now. Also, you might notice, it’s also picking up their sister’s face in a photo on the side table. 😂

That’s the only slight complaint I have so far. It’s not that big of a deal for me right now because I haven’t really been trying that hard to tag people yet and it does work for me eventually.

The Difference between Wolverine F2D and AncestryPreserve

I’m sure you are all wondering what kind of difference there is between a slide scanned with the Wolverine Converter and having Ancestry scan them. Great news is I have 185 examples! I won’t show you all of them obviously, but I will show some that I’m super happy about! I should also say there are tools on the Wolverine converter to adjust the images but I never felt comfortable enough to use them. I don’t believe those tools would have made these kind of differences though, just the coloring and contrast/highlights/shadows adjustments you see on most basic photo editing softwares.

This is one of the pictures that shows I could get the people in the photo with slide scanner, but there was some obvious clipping on the edges. Which in other pictures, could be a huge deal. Also, does anyone know what is covering the light switch on the wall behind my Aunt Barb? 😂 I’ve never noticed that in any other pictures before.

It looks like the Wolverine Converter picked up more picture to the side of Llewellyn on the right but in the Ancestry version, a path is visible. Ancestry’s enhancement has helped the focus and coloring of the image, while the Wolverine version is a bit over saturated. This is the first time I’m realizing that Llewellyn’s Aunt Agnes and Aunt Belle are in this picture. I labeled these August of 1962. In 1962 they would have been the last two surviving Love siblings. Their brother Percy died in 1961 and Llewellyn’s mother in 1960. That makes me wonder if these are cousins in the picture with them. There is another picture of this same group, but the Wolverine and Ancestry ones were pretty identical except for coloring.

Ancestry also was very consistent in remembering to flip the images. I was not consistent at all. 😂 In fact, 80% of the time, I completely forgot unless my Dad went to look at the photos and told me his Grandma’s couch was on the wrong side of the picture. Oops. Also, here was another great example of the colorizing of the photos. I had not edited the photo at all except to size it down from 4000px. So that is raw, straight from the converter. I probably could have figured out how to colorize it eventually, and maybe I will, but its not high on my priority list of things to get done right now.

How They Got Sent Back

This is what I saw when I opened the box! It had a number above my name on the outside of the box. That number matched the little barcode stickers on each ziploc bag. There was also a little orange sticker on each bag with the number of items in each bag that matched the count I wrote on each bag. There were two exceptions. On one bag, I had 18 slides written on the bag, and their sticker said 13. When I checked that album against the slides, all 18 are there. The second exception, the bag and sticker both said 27 slides but the album on Ancestry says 28 pictures. Once I checked, it looks like they scanned one slide twice.

I’m not sure what happened in those instances, just being transparent! In both instances, the error was not in detriment to the process at all on my side. In fact, by my math, I might owe Ancestry Preserve about $3.84 for the six extra scans I got. 😂

Overall Opinion

I loved the experience if I’m honest. It was nerve wracking for me to send my slides away. However, last year, we had our painting of Lewis Thorward professionally framed behind museum glass. So I had to let go of that for a couple weeks as well. The added security of being able to send an AirTag with it is awesome. I didn’t have one to use and since we have been having a lot of family issues popping up, I never made it as far as purchasing one to use. If I had one, I would have probably used it just for added reassurance.

The quality of the digitization and the ease of already having them added to my Ancestry Gallery is great. I’m happy with the overall process as well. On both the website and the Ancestry app, I had very easy access to where I was in the process and when they estimated the next step to take place. Overall, the process took me about a month to complete. A month and a half if you include from when I actually purchased the initial kit. It took me a couple weeks to sort through the slides and actually send them off.

Would I Do It Again?

Yep, in fact, I’m thinking the next project will be sorting through the big box of pictures Llewellyn passed down… It’s going to take a bit to sort through those though.

Here we are, at the end of another summer. My summer has been busy, busy, busy. As all summers are I guess. I’ve traveled to see family quite a bit, had family visit me. All in all, it was a very fun summer. I spent some time in Florida with my brother and his family and went to the annual family reunion in Upstate New York. I’m home for a long stretch now and ready to get back to work on my projects. Here is what I’m working on currently.

Family History Book

For the last 6 months or so, I’ve been working on writing up the family history on my Dad’s side of the family. My Great Aunt Barbara and her family are always interested in what I’m finding and I never really put it all together on that line before. So I did! It was really fun for me, so I am now trying to do it for each line. It’s a bit of a long process, and I’m not sure what I’m doing with it after I’m done, but I figured I can work that out later. Everyone who has read the work in progress has loved it and also given me some really good suggestions and inspiration. So I’m excited to get back to this project.

Organization

When isn’t a genealogist working on their organization? I’m still sorting through computer files and trying to make sure I don’t have 7 copies of the same image. Sometimes it feels like I do. My computer files just keep exploding into a file dump. I’m hoping just chopping away little by little is going to finally work for me. So far so good. It’s still a mess but a large percentage of my photo scans are now organized by person or family group.

Identifying Pictures

I will have some posts up soon about how I’ve been able to verify some of my previously un-identified pictures. This project has been one of the most fun ones and pretty rewarding. I really didn’t think I would ever identify some of these pictures and now I’m starting to think it will just take a little more determination. By the way, only one person in the picture above remains unidentified! Just one!

Website Organization and Overhaul

I’m still working behind the scenes to learn how to seamlessly integrate all the various sections of the website. It’s a little difficult for me to focus on coding and design these days, but I’m really inspired after talking with cousins and friends about the possibilities. One of the things I want to do is have a Diary of Llewellyn section. Where the entries are easy to navigate and there is biography pages for people mentioned and pictures integrated to help tell the story. I also still have to work on the database section of the website. My list is certainly getting longer.

I hope everyone’s had a great summer and I hope to update here at least once a month on my progress. If I’m making any cool genealogy discoveries those will be posted as well. It’s just a see how it goes situation around here right now.

Hello again. It hasn’t been 3 years since my last post. Just one. What a year though. It’s been a rough one. Here I am again, checking in with whoever is out there. I hope everyone is doing well.

Have you done genealogy research lately?

Yes, yes I have. I’m currently in the process of sorting through quite a few things. Mostly I’m trying to re-acquaint myself with my family tree. I want to go through and update on some past entries so I thought it would be good to have a little idea what I’m typing about when I do. I had done the Genealogy Do-Over before, which I chronicled quite a lot on the blog. Just looking back now, it seems my last do-over post was in 2017. Wowzers.

To say there have been some break-throughs since then would be an understatement. Nobody get too excited, nothing for the Mays or Taylor family yet. 😂 I think I will need many more years of preparation and learning before I’m able to break through there.

Continue reading “Not Three Years” →

Well, that was another three years gone. As anyone still reading here can tell. I have stopped updating my genealogy blog. For awhile it was because I just could not find the time to write about all my adventures. Then life hit. You know how it is. You are going along, working, living. Then a bunch of things happen all at once. Before you know it, you haven’t opened your genealogy for 2 years and you haven’t posted on your blog in even longer.

Continue reading “Hi There!” →

First, sorry for my long absence. I never meant to just disappear for the 863874th time. That’s not why I’m writing now though, I’m writing to apologize if anyone who is subscribed to this blog is sent 1,293 blog posts in their feed reader or email. I don’t know how that whole subscribe thing works. Which I’m going to fix by subscribing myself, which I should have done in the first place.

To explain, I have been cleaning out my old domain names on my webhost. I’ve done a lot of behind the scenes changes over the years and zero cleaning out. Since I’ve been doing this website thing for over 15 years, that means I’ve built up some clutter. This afternoon when I hit delete on an old test blog, I actually hit delete on this blog. Luckily I had a backup of my posts that I had done just last night. Go me for the forward thinking? Anyway, I was able to import my posts right back into this spot, but I’m unsure if it sent notice to anyone. Also, all my plugins are gone, so who knows if anyone is even still subscribed? Oy vey, what did I do?

To make up for my blunder, here is a picture of some parrots sitting on Great-Grandpa William L. Moore. I mean it cheered me right up!

Alright folks here’s the deal. Over the last year, I’ve been getting automatically generated emails from my web host company that I’m exceeding my memory. I’ve optimized all my databases regularly, I’ve set up caching on the blog. I’ve done all the things they say to do except move from a shared hosting plan to a virtual private server.
This is most likely why I’ve been getting the random 404 error messages. It’s why I keep breaking the website when I try to update and it errors out. I think it’s just time. I’m ready to go and move servers. I’m just not sure if the site will go down or for how long. My hosting was due to renew next week anyway, so this is a good time to try something new! In a perfect world this would be a great time for spring cleaning amongst my domains. Now isn’t the time for that though since my old hosting plan is due to run out. I’m hoping it all can be finished before renewal.
I hope to see everyone on the other side of this switch. Hopefully it’s quick and painless!

What is the GDPR?

This is a complicated question to just sum up in a little paragraph. Basically the General Data Protection Regulation is a new set of regulations for European Union countries.

You aren’t in the European Union though.

That is right, I am not. However, the internet knows no boundaries and I do have visitors from those countries. Plus, I don’t find it out of line to make sure that everything having to do with your data and my data is on the up and up.

Why are you just talking about this now?

Well, there are a few reasons for that. One, I was trying to figure out what I needed to do to make things in compliance with the laws. As an American blogger who has no links to companies I didn’t think it would be too much.

The other reason was I was waiting until it was all done, so I could say this is what I did and now none of us have to worry!

There must have been an oops in the road, there is always an oops in the road with you.

Of course there was an oops in the road. That is the Moore family motto, “Oops, let’s try that again.” Most times that was immediately following us throwing instruction booklets to the side. “Who needs instructions?”

That was not the case this time. I was trying really hard to do everything right and on time. It just didn’t happen. First of all, I have a paying website gig. Even though it is my uncle, his website had to come first. Once I thought his was ready, I started on mine.

It wasn’t until I started mine that I realized that something is happening with my website. Whether it be my host was overloaded the past week and a half, or the internet itself was, I can’t say. I just know every time I tried to do something, it would error out.

Well, what is going on.

I still don’t know. This site still seems sluggish to me. It still errors out every so often when I try to click a page. The great news is, updating my software and plugins today did not trigger any more *your site has been deleted apocalypses*

Excuse me, what?

Sorry, that was my dramatic emotions coming out. There were times this week that both my websites broke and said that there was nothing there. All while trying to update plugins, post pages, anything really. That

Enough! You’ve rambled, where are we now?

Okay, I’ve made a spiffy new Privacy Policy page. A warning, the page does use most of the suggested language of WordPress right now because I wanted to have something on the site to protect us.

I also added a Cookie notice plugin. So coming to my website the first time should trigger one, hopefully? I don’t know because I clicked accept and now I don’t see it anymore. That’s how cookies work.

The only thing is my plugins. I know that they are an important part of this whole process. They are what is actually collecting data if any. So they need to be dealt with. I’m also thinking that once I deal with them, the sluggish website might take care of itself. So that’s what I will be doing this weekend. Hopefully getting the website back to how I love it.

Oy vey.

Yeah, I hear you. So… Long time no talk! How are you guys? Aren’t we all ready for genealogy ramblings again. I know I am and I have plenty to talk about!

The Number Eight

I’ve always had a favorite number. That number is the number eight. I don’t know why that is but it just is. Most of my favorite athletes have worn the number eight jersey. Important dates in my life and that of my family usually happen with an eight in them. Or all this could just be that I only notice eights and not the other numbers.

It doesn’t really matter though because this eight is an important one!

Blogging

I have been blogging for eight years today. For some reason eight years ago, I started rambling about my family history and I’ve barely stopped since. I haven’t really put my blog out there anywhere the last few years. I just wanted to stay in my own little bubble.  I’m not a good socializer I guess. I’m really proud of what I’ve done here. I’m proud that all my ramblings are still here. I have no idea if they make sense most times, but they are here.

The Future

I don’t know what the future holds, I don’t even know what next week holds but I do want to say a huge thank you to all the wonderful people who read my blog. You guys have stayed with me through all my breaks, and all my weird ramblings. You never let me down and I’m so appreciative of the support.