[Genealib] Local society scanning church records

[Larry Naukam]

The group [the Computer Interest Group of the Ro0chester Genealogical
Society] started this as project, since many records were not available,
some record books were in awful condition, and so on. He is going to send me
a letter of introduction that they use, which I will post when it comes.

They have done about 5000 images so far, and I have seen the results. They
are magnificent [what would you expect from a group of retired Kodak and
Xerox engineers?]

His original email to me read [I have permission to republish it!] reads:
 
We are currently finishing up the records held at the Episcopal Diocese
archives on East Ave. Dave Sisson [the archivist, who is also a genealogist]
has provided the guidance. Dave also calls local Episcopal churches which we
then go and film. We have completed imaging at St Paul's and St Stephen's
and have many more to do.

We have no shortage of work. We have a backlog of churches who have agreed
to have their records digitized. As a result, I have not spread the word to
the Rochester Regional Library Council. I planned to do that when the well
starts to run dry. [he may present at one of their meetings]

Our image capture hardware is state of the art. We use an old microfilming
table and tripod provided by [discarded by!] the Salt Lake City LDS and
modified by Roger Heintz. We then use a 10 megapixel camera coupled to a
laptop to image and save the images. We then crop and enhance the images and
save the result in a PDF using Adobe Acrobat. Bookmarks, cover pages etc are
then added. The results are impressive. I will be bringing the hardware and
will give a brief talk at the October RGS meeting.

Larry N live again: The man's name is Larry Lavery [llavery at frontiernet.net]
and he has given me permission to put his name and email on this list so
that questions can be asked of him directly.