The Magic of technology…where the unknown become known
While I was on my Thanksgiving vacation, I took a ton of pictures. I got photos of friends, things that I did and so on – most of these I haven’t uploaded or even processed yet. I’ll get there – I promise. Why the delay, you ask?
The answer is because while I was there I got a nice little hobby that I had to work on. You see, I’m an odd duck (yeah, no surprise) because I like to go to Cemeteries, etc when I can. This trip, I managed to hit two of them. One of which – the Bingham City (ghost town) cemetery happened to have an Boy scout (Eagle scout) project going on.
Thing is that at the time, I didn’t realize that what I was going to do (take pictures) would actually be able to help. You see, the project they’re doing is to GPS map, identify unknown graves, restore and preserve those that are deteriorating, and just simply take care of this old cemetery.
You see, there are a ton of headstones in this old cemetery that are completely unreadable. Cemetery records weren’t kept until the turn of the century – and there are graves here from way before – some from the 1870’s. So, there are alot of unknowns – and more whose markers have become unreadable or just are missing completely.
Through the magic of technology (and me being determined to see what I could see) photoshop allowed my photos to be processed – and allow us to see a few markers – and help identify some of these settlers to Utah. I also got to see/read the inscriptions that previously were just faint grooves. Yeah, it took some time (in a couple cases well over an hour per picture) because of switching to black and white, enhansing, tone tweaking, color tweaking, blowing up, shrinking down, highlighting etc etc etc. But in the end, a few more people don’t have to be called “unknown” anymore.
How cool is that? (you can click on the pictures to see a larger size AND read what suddenly became clear on them.)
Someday, I hope that someone would be willing to do the same for me….
