07 January 2020

Digital Photography and Research

As a family historian, when researching in archives do you use your digital camera (including smartphone camera) to capture documents for later viewing?

In a survey of historians in Canada, Ian Milligan, Associate Professor of History at The University of Waterloo found that 17 out of 20 have done so multiple times. See slides for a recent presentation he gave here.

Are genealogists/family historians like those who responded to Ian's survey? Please answer below.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

John, you know the extent to which I research in the UK. The days of asking for copies is long gone, except from a distance, perhaps. I am currently working on a family tree of my Snells in Northamptonshire which it took multiple, and I mean multiple photographs to capture. It had been donated to the Devon County Archive in 1936 on paper, in the old fashioned box type.

Then I printed and cut and taped the thing together and it measures 8 feet across.

Another thing. In lots of that research in the UK, one can quickly get back to parchments, which are stretched and scraped and dried animal skins, used before much paper was available, for wills, land transactions, and such. They can measure three feet across by 2 feet up and down. No one is ever likely to even TRY to make a copy of that for you, so of course you use your camera. Cheers, BT