Taking Pictures

Every work-day morning we get up at 6:30 and get ready to go take pictures. How cool! Photo journalists in the jungles of the Dominican Republic. It sounds so . . . National Geographic-ish. But no, it's not that kind of pictures. 

Instead, we prayerfully drive through some truly remarkable traffic (the subject of another post, someday) to the office of the Junta Central Electoral, struggle to find a parking spot, and wend our way to a little room where two missionary couples share a small space just large enough to set up two cameras.

The Junta Central - where we work

An easy parking day - still smiling!

This is our camera arrangement, about ready to go.

The McIntyre's - the missionary couple we work with.

This was the first book we photographed.

After we arrive, we flip on the lights to get them warmed up and turn on the camera and the computer for another day of picture taking. 

You can see that Sherrie is very happy sitting at the computer, making sure I don't goof up. As we take pictures, they show up on the computer screen where we can check to make sure they are in focus, are lined up properly, have the right amount of black border around them, and don't have any fingers or other extraneous items in the way. 

If you are curious and technically minded, you might wonder about the camera. It is an Illunis 50 megapixel gray scale camera with a 52 mm lens. The lens looks pretty much like any camera lens, but the camera doesn't look like any kind of camera you are familiar with. It is the silver rectangular thing sitting above the lens with black wires sticking out the top. The wires run down to the computer. We generally don't touch the camera except to twist the lens as needed to adjust the focus.

We lay a book down on the copy table and after we get it all lined up and focused, we started turning pages and clicking the little button that tells the camera to take a picture. It all appears rather simple, and sometimes it is.

 This particular book came from "reconstruction". It has been repaired and rebound. There is much tape around the edges and across torn or missing spots. The resulting pages tend to be a little curly and often hard to hold down. It is not easy to hold the pages down and keep everything in focus. As you can see, one side of the book may want to be higher than the other side. We have all manner of little jigs for holding the sides up to try and keep them even.

 The reconstruction books are particularly difficult and we sort of dread having to do them. But they are not the hardest. Apparently the paper and ink do not always get along well together. After 60 years or so the ink sort of eats through the paper, leaving large holes. From a scientific standpoint it's kind of interesting to see, but it's not so much fun to work with. In addition to the little problem with the ink, these books have not been well cared for and the humidity, bugs, and rough handling have all contributed to the current state where the books are quite brittle and literally crumble

 into pieces as we try to turn pages. Often we spend a fair amount of time trying to fit pieces back in where they belong. It is not very useful  to have a picture of a record that is missing a person's name or date of birth or the parents' names or things like that. We don't worry much about what's on the bottom where the seal and clerk's signature belong.

 Particularly difficult is figuring out how to hold a page down flat when it is in this sort of condition. The pages will open to about 90 degrees without too much trouble, but they really don't like to be laid out flat. Trying to clamp a page like this is not always wise. Sometimes just a little pulling will rip a page. We really don't want the books to be worse off for our having touched them. Not good practice.

 Now, this book is in quite good shape. It's a little faded and orange spotted, and has been taped a little in spots, but the binding is not broken, the cover is attached, and it can be made to lie fairly flat. A foam wedge under each side of the book can raise and lower the sides as needed to keep them as near level as we can get. We actually use a level often to verify the position.

 This one, while the binding isn't broken, has a bit of the dissolving paper problem. In particular you may notice the mess in the bottom center of the page where the signatures go. For some reason those spots seem to get the most ink and therefore the most damage. Thankfully, that is the least important information as far as genealogy is concerned.

 In the bottom left corner of the book you can see a clip that we use to hold the page down flat. It requires a little pulling, which is not good for the rest of a torn page, so sometimes we have to use a little bit of tape to keep things in place. Perhaps you see in the middle of the book little pieces of pages that have broken off and just been shoved back in. Those are always fun. It's sort of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It takes a lot of time and careful effort.

 On this page (over to the right, unless your computer is formatting this differently) you can see just to the right of the center of the page one of those interesting holes that goes through 20 or so pages. We have to keep reminding ourselves that each page is somebody's record and contains information that may be important to their family. So, we do the best we can.

Pages like these are fairly common. I'd hate to be the one doing the indexing on these books. I imagine indexing the Dominican Republic is going to be a really tough problem. Hopefully our picture quality will not add to the difficulty.

 There are a lot of books. Right now we're doing birth records (nacimientos). 

In addition to the birth records, there are also deaths, marriages, divorces, and whatever else, but they are in other rooms.

The books are stored on the shelves by city, in more or less alphabetical order, and sorted by date within each city. The earliest books go back into the late 1800s and there are not very many of those. Right now we are photographing the books only up to 1949

because those are the worst ones and the ones that are in the greatest need of being digitally preserved before they completely disintegrate. So we go alphabetically from city to city, doing all the available books up to 1949.
 
At present we have just started Santo Domingo. That's going to be a lengthy project. 

 Recently I was talking to the "librarian", the person in charge of checking out and returning the books, and she told me there are about 129,000 books held in this building and listed in the computer. Some of the books are not recorded in the computer yet. And of couse, each year they get another set from all over the country. 

 On a good day, if we have books in good condition, between the two missionary couples, we can do as many as 10 books in a day. By my calculation, it would take about 50 years to do all those books.

 If you click on the pictures you can zoom in and see more detail. If you look closely at the white bar code labels on the books on the far right of this picture, you can see they are labeled "defuncion oportuna" from the city of San Rafael del Yuma. Defunciones are death records (being dead is pretty much disfunctional?) and oportuna means it was reported in a reasonable time. Sometimes a death is not reported for several months or years and that would be reported in a different book, labeled defuncion tarde or something like that. 

 Interestingly, with the birth records there is another category besides "timely" and "late", called "reconocimientos". These are where (usually) the father comes along perhaps 20 years later to acknowledge that he is the father of someone. These are going to be especially interesting and hard to deal with because without indexing there is no way to find them.

Most of the books we do, after the main section where the clerk fills in the form, have a blank section where the clerk writes in the "reconocimientos'. It is a little surprising to me to see how many of those there are. I suppose it could be that back in the first half of the 1900s there were a lot of births out in the sugar cane fields that were simply not reported until many years later. 

As you can imagine, we need to get new books fairly often. We understand that in most archives where FamilySearch has cameras, a local custodian brings out new books and returns the old ones for us. But, this is the Dominican Republic. We just go back into the appropriate rooms, climb up on the shelves, and get whatever books we need. Then we load them on a cart and take them to the "librarian" who checks them out to us. It is an interesting procedure, made much more interesting when the librarian is not available.

 But if it works properly, we come back with a cart full of 10 to 20 books that will keep us going for another day or so. Actually, we seldom are able to do 5 books in a day, so this batch may last us several days.

After a day of picture taking we hobble our weary bones back out of the building, try to get our car out of the parking lot, and then begin the adventure of driving home. Always an adventure.

I'm not sure what happened to the "going to the beach" every afternoon, that they talked about in Salt Lake. Maybe that's a different mission.