Dear PCFR Members and Friends, Here's a wonderful article about yesterday's photo-scanning event that appeared in today's Daily Reflector. Wish I could send the photos, too. Eleanor, Wayne, Betsy, Brenda, Laymond, Robin, Roger, Frank, Bill, and ALL OTHERS who participated make us so proud. This was a huge success! Those of us who couldn't be there (myself included) are very appreciative of your time and effort on this worthwhile project. A big "THANK YOU" for making us look so good!! Janice _________________________________________________ Effort preserves Pitt County images By T. Scott Batchelor, The Daily Reflector Crinkled, torn and faded images of Pitt County ancestors passed through a beam of light Saturday that transformed them into ones and zeros, preserving legacies for coming generations. People brought dozens of photographs of relatives and old homesteads to Sheppard Memorial Library to have them scanned into a computer during an effort called Picturing Pitt County. It was the first such session sponsored by Pitt County Family Researchers, a genealogical society dedicated to cataloging the family trees of Pitt residents. Herman Allen showed up with several photos that were scanned onto a computer hard drive and ultimately burned onto a CD-ROM to be used as another resource for genealogists. In a 1915 snapshot, a line of relatives - including Allen's mother with his then-baby brother cradled in her arms - posed in front of a house on Hooker Road in Greenville. Behind the home stood rows of corn. "If something happens to them, they'll be preserved," Allen said of the photographs being scanned into the system. Eleanor Allen, the PCFR member who headed up the effort to create the database, said the photographs will be cataloged by family name and geographic location so researchers can cross-reference them. She expects the CD-ROMs to be available in the next few months. The next step is to place the images on the society's Web page, where some photos already reside. Frank Clark brought a picture of his father, Warren Henry Clark, that was snapped in 1898 in the Beaufort County town of Pantego. Clark, wearing a suit and cocked hat in the photo, came with his family to Pitt County in the 1920s in search of farming's greener pastures, his son said. "I've been doing this now for 22 years," Clark, 68, said of his efforts to detail the family tree. "It's important to me because I wanted to teach young people a little more about their family, their ancestors, where they came from and what they look like." Those efforts, including preserving the images in a database, is especially important for black families such as his, because records for them are sparse, Clark said. An hour after the session began at 10 a.m., Eleanor Allen said volunteers had helped scan about 30 photographs. Allen used a digital camera to photograph the photographs that couldn't fit on the flat-bed scanner - a device that looks and operates like a photocopier, but instead of spitting out paper copies sends the images onto a computer's hard drive. The image on the camera was then uploaded to the computer hard drive. She used that method for a wide picture of the 1914 graduating class of East Carolina Teachers College. Besides serving as a centralized location for photo storage, the Saturday session also bolstered the rolls of PCFR, organization President Bill Kittrell said. "People have joined today," he said. Begun in 1994 with about 20 members, the organization now boasts a roster of more than 250, with participants hailing from as far away as California, Kittrell said. Electronically preserving the images of families and structures important to Pitt County is a necessity because many of them would be lost otherwise, he said. "Some of the family members don't care about old pictures," Kittrell said. "They get thrown away." Luckily, Ann Whitehurst Johnson had a copy of a photograph of her grandparents that was damaged in a recent fire. That photo was being scanned into the database on Saturday, adding another layer of protection and making them available to those who want to become acquainted with their ancestors. "It's just a wonderful way of being able to share with other people," Johnson said. Eleanor Allen said she hopes to organize more scanning sessions and to catalog other documents, such as family Bible records, using the same technology. The Pitt County Family Researchers Web site is www.rootsweb.com/~ncpcfr/ T. Scott Batchelor can be contacted at sbatchelor@coxnews.com