Miscellaneous useful stuff

Miscellaneous useful stuff gleaned from the web: a hard copy research trip bible, and a digital scrapbook

Creating a Genealogy Research Trip (GRT) Bible | Genealogy With Valerie:

You have the location of your trip picked out, you know the route you will take and if you will make any stops on your way there or back, you know where you will be staying and you have a list of the documents that you want to search for. What now?

The next step would be to make your GRT Bible. This is what my husband called covermy master binder that I put together for my first trip. In it will be your itinerary and other much needed information. It will save you time and keep you on track. It is also an easy reference that you can look at anytime you need to.

Book Review: BarbwireDigi’s Guide to Creating A Digital Genealogy Scrapbook | Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter:

Ms. Groth has published a guide for creating a digital scrapbook, specifically targeted for the users of Adobe Photoshop Elements. This program is an excellent photo-editing software for many genealogists, most especially for beginners. It’s fairly easy to learn, and does an excellent job of preparing photos for viewing and publication, adequately meeting the needs of most of us. Besides removing red-eye and cropping photos, I use photo-editing software to enhance contrast and modify light values on fuzzy scanned documents for improved readability and clarity. And, most importantly, Elements is affordable.

The first chapters of Creating a Genealogy Digital Scrapbook review the advantages of creating digital scrapbooks over the traditional scrapbook methods, then recommend the basic tools you’ll need: computer, scanner, digital camera, and the like.

My instinct is to do it the other way round: for our last few research trips I've used Microsoft OneNote for our trip planning. Evernote would work too, but I find OneNote better for drawing tables. And the tables have a list of things to do in each place, and notes can be added when you are there -- how much you did, and what you found or didn't, people you saw, and so on. But this article makes a good case for having a hard-copy binder as well -- opening up the laptop while sitting in the car and squinting to see the screen to find directions to that cemetery is a hassle. Hard copy would be easier.