When we started working on our genealogical quest it was at first just names, dates, and place names without a lot of life. Fortunately we discovered that the original genealogists in the family had saved a large treasure trove of pictures in several suitcases.

The pictures had become somewhat of a forgotten item when they were discovered by my mother, Virginia Whitehead. She spent many long hours with Frances and Martha Comer painstakingly identifying each person in each photograph. We discovered that Frances and Martha had amazing memories for family members and events, and in the end there were few pictures without identifying names.

It was from this venture that we learned the value of photographs in genealogical research. Once we had faces to go with the names the nature of the research changed completely. No longer were we just looking for new data, but we were looking for the data that would explain just who the individuals in the photographs were and what events defined their lives.

Photographs are difficult to organize because of the complications of name changes with marriages, the mixture of places and people, and unknown or unidentified photographs. To create continuity in the naming and organization of our pictures we followed these rules.

• If the picture is of a single person, then it is organized under that person's name.
• If the picture is of more than one person, the one person is identified as the primary person and the others are listed as "others in the photograph" so that they can be found through the search function.
• If we know no one in the picture, but have a general indication that it is a group of Boland relatives, then it will be labeled as such with no primary person.
• If the picture is of a woman prior to her marriage, then it is indexed under her maiden name unless her maiden name is unknown, in which case it is indexed under her married name.
• If the picture is of a woman after her marriage date, then it is indexed under her married name and her maiden name noted on the photograph if known.
• All photographs are named with a prefix of "pix," followed by their last name, followed by their initials, followed by a two digit number to separate duplicate names. For example, a photograph of Robert E. Lee on the left would be labeled as pix_lee_re_01 if it is the first photograph of him in the files.
• Photographs of unknown groups of people are labeled assuming that the initials are "grp" indicating a group of people.
• Photographs of places are labeled first with the location (if known) and an abbreviated description of the scene.
• All pictures have been resized, cleaned, and labeled on the picture itself so that the description cannot become separated from the picture.

In all cases we are trying to provide enough information about each photograph to allow easy location logically or through the search function.

Cleaning up our photographs has proven to be quite a project. Photographs come to us in various states of preservation and quality varies widely. Fortunately there are tools available like Adobe PhotoShop which help greatly in the process.

All of our pictures are cleaned up a bit and then resized to fit on a normal screen. Pictures which would normally be presented in a horizontal format are resized to 855 pixels wide and made proportionally tall so as not to distort the image. Pictures that would normally be presented vertically are sized to 855 pixels high. Then we add white space to the bottom of the picture to allow notations before saving the picture in JPG format.

Finally the pictures are viewed at various qualities and saved at the highest resolution needed to present a clear picture at a resolution of 96 pixels.