Follow Friday - More Genea Angel Awards

I have had two close encounters with Genea Angels this week, and I want to recognize both. I had been under weather last week, and getting frustrated on line when the first angel one came to my rescue. The other one swooped in to help me out when I was staying up late, trying to catch up on my blog posts. Two frustrated comments left on Facebook, and then two blogger friends named Carol jumped in to save me!

First, last week I was on line looking in to the ancestry of my daughter’s boyfriend. We had met his parents last month, and his Dad asked me to see what he could find on his immigrant ancestor. This particular ancestor arrived in Boston from Italy in 1880, and was a real stretch for me to research. I have very few immigrant ancestors after 1650, and no experience with Italian genealogy. But I found him in the censuses and vital records, even though every record has his name spelled a different way. I was very excited to find him in several early Boston newspapers (with a completely new spelling!) found via Google News Search. However, I could find no way to print or save the images.

I had put my complaint on the discussion wall at Facebook for the group “Genealogy Bloggers”. To my rescue came Carol Yates Wilkerson from the blog “iPentimento”. (Go there and ask to be part of the group. You have to ask to be invited, but it is well worth it!) I had 22 responses, but Carol stuck with me online as we tried to figure out the problem. Not only did she put her suggestions on the wall, but we emailed privately, too. She snagged the photo using “SnagIt”, put it into a word file and emailed it back to me. Apparently, unless you use software such as “SnagIt” or perhaps the printscreen button there is no way to capture these old newspaper images. I’m looking into buying my own copy of “SnagIt” ASAP!

Secondly, last night I was burning the midnight oil to finish up today’s post. Suddenly I got the message that I could not upload anymore images to my Blogger based blog because my 1024 MB of space had been used up! Panic ensued. This was Wordless Wednesday and I needed my photos. I posted my frustration on my Facebook wall, and Carol A. Bowen Stevens from the blog “Reflections from the Fence” jumped in to action. Many friends put in their 2 cents of advice, but Carol began to send me private messages with solid advice, and she held my hand online and virtually guided me through the process. By the next morning I not only understood the problem, but I was on the way to resolving it.

I had been blithely blogging along not understanding how the Blogger platform was working. All photos were going in a Picasa file limited to 1024 MB. I was taking photos digitally at 5 megapixels and popping them into my posts, which almost always feature one, two, three or more photos! After a year and half it was completely full at 808 photos. There were several solutions. I could pay for extra space on Picasa. I could use Flikr or Photobucket or another similar photo storage in the cloud. But I had to resolve my large file issues, and reduce the photo sizes at least on future posts or I would run into the same problem again.

Carol patiently walked me through understanding all this. I also learned how to downsize my photos first, and how to choose a link for a photo from another storage website, and how to copy the link into my blog. This was all new to me, and probably is getting snide guffaws of laughter from the more technically inclined geeks out there in Bloggerland. I also learned about the editing program “Picnik” which resides inside “Picasa” to reduce the size of the photos currently stored there.

Thank you Carol S. and Carol W.! You deserve golden halos this week!

Please visit the Carols blogs!

Carol Yates Wilkerson http://ipentimento.com/

Carol A. Bowen Stevens http://www.reflectionsfromthefence.com/

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Copyright 2011, Heather Wilkinson Rojo