But look how close these were to being lost! They were in a fire and could easily have been destroyed, but fortunately the flames just nipped around the edges and didn’t destroy the images themselves.

Photographs are so precious and so vulnerable. Printed on paper, they can all too easily be destroyed by fire or flood, or damaged by mold, mildew, insects, etc. Digital images can be lost when a drive crashes, deleted in error or forgotten in the transfer to a new computer. And both types of photographs can be lost to posterity if the right person doesn’t take possession of them after you’re gone.

So scan every paper photograph you care about, and make more than one copy of the file, kept in different places on and offline. Give copies to members of your family, either on a CD/DVD or other storage device, or sent by e-mail. Upload them to Facebook or Flickr or Ancestry.com — the more copies that are out there, the less likely it is that the image will be lost to future generations.

Digital copies are great, but make paper copies, too. Prints are inexpensive, so make lots and give them to all your family members. Some people will just toss them in a file or a desk drawer, but most of those copies will get passed along to younger family members, and there’s usually at least one person in every generation that’s interested in this kind of thing.

The care and preservation of photographs is a complex topic, and there are lots of books and websites that explain it all in more detail. But sometimes I think the technical stuff scares people away, and that they put off doing anything with their photographs until they have time to learn more and do it right. But don’t put it off — stuff happens and a single copy of a photograph can so easily be lost forever.

If you’re lucky, they left you pictures of all these places, but what if they didn’t? My favorite source for this kind of picture is the online postcard store CardCow. They sell real postcards here, but after the card is sold, they keep the scanned images and information on the site. They’ve been doing this for years, and now have a huge collection of postcard images online. You can search by keyword, or browse by category: Churches, Hotels, Amusement Parks, etc. I like to browse by location so I can browse through all the pictures of a particular place, like my hometown: Worcester, Massachusetts. There’s no way to limit a search by date, but try throwing a year in a keyword search anyway. For cards that were mailed, the year of the postmark is indexed, so you just might get lucky. For example : 1906 Syracuse New York. Just keep in mind that you’re excluding all of the postcards that lacked a postcard, and that the dates aren’t very precise because many postcards were sold over a period of several years.

Once you find postcards thahttp://www.ethomsen.com/wp-admin/media-new.phpt are connected to your family history, you have a lot of options. You can order the actual postcard, if it hasn’t been sold already. As devoted as I am to digital images, I like keeping some of these in my paper files, and imagine my future grandchildren discovering them someday. It’s also to embed the postcard images in a blog or website as I have done in this post. You can get the code to copy-and-paste in three different sizes. The image will be linked back to the Cardcow site, and have a subtle watermark. For cards that have already been sold, you can also buy a digital image in different sizes, starting at $3 for a 600 x 377 unwatermarked image for posting on the web. Larger files (1660 x 1044) with various rights are also available.

These old postcards can supplement family photographs, and help bring your family story to life!

Nubble Light is just off the easternmost point of Cape Neddick in York, Maine. It’s one of the most-often photographed lighthouses in New England not only because of its beauty, but because it’s so easy to photograph. It’s located on a tiny island just off Sohier Park, which provides ample parking and a great view of the lighthouse. Visitors are not allowed on the island itself, which means that there’s no one wandering in front of the lighthouse cluttering up your shot, and nearly every photograph of the island and lighthouse looks picture-perfect.

Nubble Light Links

More information and photographs of this 1879 lighthouse:

• The Nubble — The website of the Friends of the Nubble
• Cape Neddick (“Nubble”) Lighthouse — Don’t miss the history section for some great old pictures, including one of a lighthouse keeper’s child riding in a “bucket” suspended on a line across the channel to attend school on the mainland. (From New England Lighthouses: A Virtual Guide)
• Nubble Light — A Flickr group devoted to photographs of this lighthouse

View Nubble Light in a larger map

This video from the Smithsonian Magazine showcases some of Eudora Welty’s photographs of Mississippi during the Depression, with commentary by friends and scholars including Reynolds Price and Robert MacNeil. They’re interesting, but I really just like to watch the photographs drift by.

Eudora Welty as Photographer — “Photographs by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Eudora Welty display the empathy that would later infuse her fiction” (By T.A. Frail; Smithsonian Magazine; April, 2009)

I enjoyed playing around with the service, and I especially liked the examples using iconic images like American Gothic and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. It’s fascinating to see all the different ways these images have been changed and used for various purposes, and it’s impressive that TinEye’s algorithms are able to identify these altered images as copies of the original work.

However, as interesting as I thought Tineye was, I didn’t actually find it much practical use in finding unauthorized copies of my images on other webpages. I searched for some of my photographs that were used on various pages that I knew about, just to test it out, and had very little success. Tineye acknowledged that its database was still relatively small but growing all the time, but I stopped bothering using it to look for copyright issues. I had better success looking in my Flickr referrer logs and just doing word searches on Google Images.

But recently I decided to give it another try, and was quite impressed with my results. I searched a few of my photographs and found several unauthorized copies on various websites. Nearly all of my photographs are posted on Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution / Non-Commercial / Sharealike license, and it’s discouraging to find people downloading them and using them without the required attribution, and on commercial sites. I send a message to each site asking that they add the credit line or remove the image, and most people apologize and comply. A few don’t respond or don’t seem to understand the problem, and one person was quite rude. It seems that there are a lot of people who ought to know better, including bloggers, journalists, teachers and sometimes even my fellow librarians, who would never commit plagiarism and give sources for quotations but treat other people’s photographs as if they had no value other than as eye candy, unworthy of a simple credit line. It’s especially annoying to find my work used without credit on blogs whose content is marked All Rights Reserved.

(You’ll have to forgive the soapbox — I found a lot of my uncredited copies of my photographs floating around the web today, thanks to Tineye!)

Links:

• TinEye
• A Simple TinEye Tutorial

I ran across this postcard on CardCow last week. It’s one of the preprinted cards sent to people who submitted questions to the popular Quiz Kids radio program. As an old time radio buff, I knew that the program featured bright kids answering questions to win Savings Bonds, and that the regulars became junior celebrities who occasionally made appearances on other programs. I had recently heard them on an episode of the Jack Benny program. I also knew that the Quiz Kids program was the inspiration for It’s a Wise Child, the fictional radio program in J. D. Salinger’s stories about the Glass family.

But I really didn’t know much about the show itself. I tried listening to the show online at the Internet Archive, but it’s too dated and hokey even for me.

I had better luck with the 1982 book Whatever Happened to the Quiz Kids: Perils and Profits of Growing Up Gifted by Ruth Duskin Feldman, one of the most popular Quiz Kid girls. The first part of the book is the author’s story of her family, her experiences as a Quiz Kid, and her life after she graduated from the program at age 16. Her parents were loving and supportive, her memories of her Quiz Kids experiences are mostly positive, and her adult life seems to have been successful. The stories of the other Quiz Kids are actually more interesting, some did well for themselves, sometimes in unexpected ways, and others ran into difficulties and disappointments. Although their experiences were unique because of the attention and fame they won as Quiz Kids, but they are also case studies in growing up gifted.

I took this picture of my dog Nina three years ago and posted it on Flickr. I love the expression on her face, and the way the draped towel makes her look like the Virgin Mary. It wasn’t posed, I was drying her off in the bathtub, turned to get another towel to wrap her in and lift her out, and caught the expression on her face, and grabbed the camera.

I haven’t looked at this in a while, but it yesterday it received an invitation to put it in the Flickr group Wrapped Canines. This is what I love about Flickr, there’s a group for everything. There isn’t one dog group, there are dozens of dog groups, each with its own style or topic. There are general dog groups like Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!, with nearly 60,000 members and over 500,000 photos, and groups for specific types of pictures: Dog-Tired for sleeping dogs, Dogs in Lakes and Dogs in Pools, groups for specific breeds from Bernese Mountain Dogs to Shih Tzu Central, and much, much more.

Wrapped Canines is a group for a very specific type of photo: “Dogs in towels, dogs in hoods, dogs in blankets, dogs peeking out from behind curtains and drapes, dogs who are partially visible due to their involvement in fabric.” But apparently that’s not specific enough, because the group’s admin needed to add “Please, no dogs merely sitting on top of the bed – must be wrapped. Any costumes, please have a wrap, hood, or drape effect to it.” I understand this — I run 23 of my own groups on Flickr, and you wouldn’t believe how people try to push the boundaries.

I added my picture of wrapped Nina to the group, and spent way too much time looking at everyone else’s pictures of much-loved dogs draped in towels, blankets and scarves. Silly and cute stuff– definitely raised my mood!

Here are my suggestions for things to do while waiting for Wait, Wait to come on. They also work if you find yourself needing a midweek Wait, Wait pick-me-up:

• Wait, Wait Archive, 1998-2005 — Listen to an old episode. You can use the calendar on the Wait, Wait site to browse back to shows from the last five years. But if you want to go back to earlier programs, try this link. I like listening to the really old ones, because the news quizzes are much harder five or ten years later, and bring back memories.
• Wait Wait… Don’t Blog Me! — Check out the Wait, Wait blog for some brief, amusing facts, photos and stories more or less related to the program
• Listen to my favorite segment, Mavis Staples doing Not My Job:
  Mavis Staples
  
• Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me on YouTube — Watch some of the many official and unofficial Wait Wait videos on YouTube