DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - DEC 2015
COMPILING AND EDITING A COLLECTION OF FAMILY
LETTERS
©2016 Donald R. Snow -- This page was
last updated 2016-02-26
These Freeware Corner notes are published in
TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and
Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter,
and are posted on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be corrections or updates.
This Freeware Corner note
will discuss the topic of letter
collections and show some freeware
programs to use. It will be
illustrated with the collection
of Erastus Snow's family letters that my
family and I have compiled, edited, and posted
online.
BENEFITS OF A FAMILY LETTER COLLECTION
Family letters give a different view about a
person and his or her family than official or
business letters, or even a journal, since
they are usually more informal. They
preserve family events, reactions to world
events, sayings of the times, and even
genealogy of the family. And they help
us turn our hearts to our ancestor, one of our
goals in family history.
STEP 1: COMPILE THE LETTER COLLECTION
If you plan to do a letter collection about a
particular person or family, you may find that
family members already have many letters for
the person. You may also find letters,
or copies of letters, in libraries or archives
near where they lived or in organizations they
were associated with. You even find
letters published in newspapers, especially
small-town newspapers, since when someone
wrote back home, the editor would frequently
publish the letter because of local
interest. Good examples are people away
in the military service. I found several
letters from my Dad written home to his Mother
in St. George, Utah from Germany and France
during World War I. They were published
in the local newspaper, the Washington County
Times, since the editor felt that people would
be interested. One story that I heard my
Father tell that I thought I would never be
able to document was detailed in a published
letter he wrote to my Grandmother from
Germany. For Utah newspapers the
website http://digitalnewspapers.org/
is based on a grant that the Library of
Congress has given the University of Utah
Library to digitize all Utah newspapers.
These digitized newspapers are posted online
and are completely word-searchable, if the
OCR'ing (Optical Character Recognition)
software was working well. On that
website is a listing with the newspapers with
bars to indicate the years that have been
digitized so far. As you find the
letters, it helps to keep track of where each
came from so you can attribute them correctly
later.
STEP 2: SCAN THE LETTERS
There are many good scanners these days, but
you can always just go to your local Family
History Center and use one there. The
LDS Church is providing good-quality Lexmark
scanners to FHCs that scan directly to a flash
drive without having to go through a computer
first. I recommend scanning them to pdf
(Portable Document Format) at about 150 dots
per inch. The pdf format makes them
viewable by many free programs and easy
to work with.
If photos are included, or if it is from a
newspaper and had a picture with it, you might
want to scan at a higher resolution. As
a rule of thumb the Library of Congress
recommends scanning documents or photos at
about 250 dots per inch for each inch of the
final product. So the beginning picture
and final product sizes determine the dpi to
use. This means that if you are scanning
a slide, which is about 1 inch high, and you
want to print it later to about 8 x 10 inches,
you need to scan it at 8 x 250 = 2000 dpi, at
least. Otherwise, you might get
pixilation (breaking up into little
squares). Since letters or a newspaper
article are already about the size you want
for a final print, scanning them at about
150-250 dpi allows you to view the scans at
about the same size as the originals without a
problem. Most FHC's seem to set their
Lexmark scanners to default to pdf at about
150 dpi. I usually scan in just black
and white unless there is any color on the
page, even colored ink.
STEP 3: TRANSCRIBE THE LETTERS
Once scanned, the simplest way to transcribe
the letters is just to read the scans and type
into a text editor what you see. There
are several variations of this, for example,
instead of using a word processor, use a free
program like EVERNOTE, available from https://evernote.com/
. In EVERNOTE you can set up a notebook
for each collection of letters and type each
letter into a separate note. This keeps
them all together and makes them easy to sort
and find. Another method of transcribing
letters is to read them aloud and use voice
recognition software, but I have found that
there leaves so much editing to do afterwards,
that it's easier to just type them in to start
with. There is a free program for
personal use called TRANSCRIPT, available
from http://www.jacobboerema.nl/en/Freeware.htm
, that works like FamilySearch Indexing where
you see the image at the top and a place to
type the information below. As you type
and press the Return key at the end of the
line, it moves the image for you. At
present I am not aware of any program that
will read handwriting and convert it into text
without many errors, but people are working on
this since it would be so helpful.
STEP 4: NAMING THE FILES
This is the key to being able to sort and find
the letters you are looking for. A
system I have developed is the following and
more details are in other class notes on my
webpage http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
. Here's an example of the name I would
give to a letter.
ESLTRS-1884-09-03-From,SnowErastus,MissouriStLouis-To,BemanArtimesia(Snow),UtahStGeorge
.
The ESLTRS (abbreviation for Erastus Snow
Letters) adds a code at the start so these
letters all sort together. The date of
the letter is next and written in
International Date Format of YYYY-MM-DD, so
they sort chronologically for that collection,
no matter what order you type them in.
With this naming they automatically jump to
where they belong, whether in EVERNOTE or any
other program, without you having to move them
manually. The From and To formats
make it so that you can easily find all
letters from or to an individual and also sort
on their locations. And the locations
are written so everything from each country or
state sorts together. If these are in
EVERNOTE, they sort in chronological order
there and are automatically backed up in your
online EVERNOTE account. If they are
text files in some text format on your
computer, the freeware program EVERYTHING,
available from http://voidtools.com/
, will find, sort, and show them in
chronological order, no matter where they are
on your computer. EVERYTHING also allows
you to find how many letters of each type you
have and even move the ones you want to a
different folder, if desired.
STEP 5: EDITING
As you work with the
transcriptions, you most likely will
find typos and want to add editorial
comments. Correct these in your original
database so you always have the latest version
on your computer. Editorial comments can
be put in square brackets, e.g. [.......], so
people can tell that was not in the original
letter. I add editorial comments of the
full names of people, full locations, and full
names of events, so they will be recognizable
to folks reading the transcription and will be
electronically searchable. I also add
editorial comments with identifying
information to events like the Civil War,
since it was not called that at the time and
this makes it so you can find such references
by searching electronically.
STEP 6: LIST OF INTERESTING THINGS FROM
THE LETTERS
When I find something interesting in a letter
while transcribing or editing it, I write a
short statement starting with the letter date
and describing the item. For example,
when Erastus Snow wrote that he wondered if
the "Union was going to burst up" (Civil War)
I would write a note that said something like
"1860-MM-DD - Erastus wonders if Union will
burst up - Civil War" and add that to a list
of Interesting Items. Or if he is
offering a bribe to get his children to study
their geography, I would write "1871-MM-DD -
Erastus offers his map to first child to learn
the capitals of the U.S. states." This
has given me a list of hundreds of items of
interest in the letters. I later decide
on categories to sort them, e.g. Family Life,
LDS Church History, Health and Physical
Well-Being, Sayings of the Times, etc.
From these categories it is easy to select
excerpts for articles, talks, and classes.
STEP 7: EXPORTING THE LETTERS FROM
EVERNOTE
I use EVERNOTE and form notebooks for the
various letter collections I have. When
I am ready to post the set online, I export
them from EVERNOTE using the Export command
and save them to separate files in html format
(computer jargon). This forms a folder
of all the files I have selected with an
"Index" file showing all their names.
Clicking on the Index file opens my default
browser and brings up the html index
file. Clicking on the title of any
letter opens
it to view in the browser. This makes it
look like you are on the Internet, but it is
just in a browser on my computer. When I
find typos, I correct them in my EVERNOTE
collection, so that next time I export the
set, it includes the corrections. When I
am ready to post these to the Internet, I FTP
(more computer jargon) the folder to the
website and include the link on my FH Class
Notes webpage.
STEP 8: SEARCHING THE FILES
After exporting from EVERNOTE, to search the
file names on my own computer, I use
EVERYTHING. This allows finding all
letters that have certain criteria or dates or
who to or from or locations in their
titles. To search for words inside the
files, and not just in the titles, there are
several freeware programs that help. One
I like is FREE COMMANDER from http://freecommander.com/en/summary/
. In FREE COMMANDER click File >
Search (or just CTRL-F) and you get a screen
with search boxes for titles or for
content. To search the content of all
files in a folder, enter the name of the
folder and include subfolders, if
desired. Then enter the search terms in
the content box, do the searches, and you see
the titles of all files containing those
search terms. Click on a file title to
open it. The only way I have found to
get the search terms highlighted with FREE
COMMANDER is to click on CTRL-F and type in
the search terms again. There are
several other free programs that will search
within files and I wrote a Freeware Corner
article about some of them last year. To
search on the files on my website, including
the Erastus Snow letters, I have set it up to
do Google searches by you entering the search
terms -- see the "Click Here To Google Search"
note at the top of my webpage http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
.
STEP 9: VIEWING THE FILES IN EVERNOTE
EVERNOTE has a "Presentation" mode in the
commercial versions. To see a single
note in presentation mode just click on the
Projection Screen icon at the top-right of the
note. To see a collection of notes in
presentation mode, highlight them all, right
click, and select Present, or click on the
Start Presentation button below. You
will see the notes in full-screen with larger
text so it shows up well on a projector or
even just on a computer monitor for several
people to watch. The mouse wheel, the
arrows down and up, and the Pages down or up
buttons move you down or up through a
note. When showing several notes,
CTRL+(Right Arrow) or CTRL+(Left Arrow) takes
you to the next or previous note. When
you reach the last note, it cycles back to the
first note you highlighted. The ESC key
takes you out of presentation mode. This
is a simple way to show the notes without
having to export them from EVERNOTE, but it is
not available in the free version.
This gives you ideas and how to work with
letter collections. They are a good
family history resource and tell good stories.