This is more like a "Hint from Heloise" than a snippet of genealogy data. Scanners have advanced a lot in the past few years. Most of them have Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. They can read clean documents and put the data into a text file. If the page is clean, clear and in a commonly used font, it takes a minute or two per page. The one we have at work, a top of the line model, has read copies of pages from old books, with ten generations of Xerox pimples, with 90% accuracy. It reads original pages -- things I printed once and deleted, then decided I wanted to keep -- with 99% accuracy. Scanners start at $59 at Wal*Mart and go up to $200 or so. Some copy shops (Kinko's, in my neck of the woods) will let you use theirs for $10 an hour. Scanning hard copy wouldn't be particularly efficient if you just have names. Scanners can't enter names, birthdates and relationships into the proper slots of your genealogy program. If you have three pages of notes for the first four generations, a scanner might be worth thinking about. ----- Original Message ----- From: Eric and Sara Long <scoobydoo@sltic.com> To: <CADY-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 1999 5:22 AM Subject: [CADY-L] Lemuel Cady and Ruth Gleason > > Looking for those researching Lemuel Cady and Ruth Gleason. I had > everyone's names in my database along with 3500 names in my family tree. I > have lost it all thanks to my BIL. I have lost several branches of my > trees. Thank god that I have some on hard copy. I thought that I had it > backed up but now I can't even find that. Thanks for any help. > > Sara > scoobydoo@sltic.com > > >