Going back to someone's roots
My parents are tracing their family trees, and when I visited them recently, I helped my father photograph an old book called Pemberton Pedigrees, held by the Lancashire Archives in Preston. The plan is to make the information in the book available on Pemberton Family World Wide, a project to gather and share any genealogical information about anyone called Pemberton. (There are thousands of such projects to research individual surnames, known as one-name studies.) They already have a microfilm copy of the book, which they’ve started to scan, but parts of it were badly-photographed and are almost unreadable. With a bit of luck, our contribution will fill in the gaps.
The charts were compiled by Major-General Robert Charles Boileau Pemberton. The book was an impressive piece of work for a time when there was no internet (and therefore no online genealogical databases) and few telephones. He gathered much of the information by visiting the families concerned. He died in 1914 before he could publish, and one of his sons, Reverend Robert Pemberton, published the first 40 charts in 1923. He intended to publish more, along with biographical information, but never did. If anyone knows the whereabouts of the remaining material, the researchers would be delighted to hear from them.
The book consists mainly of fold-out charts, which would be rather awkward to photocopy, so we decided to use my camera. We were allowed to use a tripod, as long as it was entirely on the table. We got a good set of photos, but by the end of the session, my knees were killing me from leaning against the table to see the camera’s screen. (Click here for a photo of me at work.)
My camera tends to be noisy in low light, so I set the film speed as slow as it would go (ISO 80) and set the shutter speed to a fifth of a second. This let the camera use a small aperture, increasing depth of field. (You wouldn’t have thought that a plane perpendicular to the lens could be partly in focus and partly out, but on the test shots, I noticed some blurring at the edges of the image. You could still read what it said, but I’d prefer the whole thing to be in focus if possible.)
Click here to see one of the charts. (This is one of the smaller ones, which I was able to fit into one photo. Most needed two or three images.)
My dad was pleased with the results, and is about to post a CD of the photos to Pemberton Family World Wide. Watch this space to see what they do with them.
The charts were compiled by Major-General Robert Charles Boileau Pemberton. The book was an impressive piece of work for a time when there was no internet (and therefore no online genealogical databases) and few telephones. He gathered much of the information by visiting the families concerned. He died in 1914 before he could publish, and one of his sons, Reverend Robert Pemberton, published the first 40 charts in 1923. He intended to publish more, along with biographical information, but never did. If anyone knows the whereabouts of the remaining material, the researchers would be delighted to hear from them.
The book consists mainly of fold-out charts, which would be rather awkward to photocopy, so we decided to use my camera. We were allowed to use a tripod, as long as it was entirely on the table. We got a good set of photos, but by the end of the session, my knees were killing me from leaning against the table to see the camera’s screen. (Click here for a photo of me at work.)
My camera tends to be noisy in low light, so I set the film speed as slow as it would go (ISO 80) and set the shutter speed to a fifth of a second. This let the camera use a small aperture, increasing depth of field. (You wouldn’t have thought that a plane perpendicular to the lens could be partly in focus and partly out, but on the test shots, I noticed some blurring at the edges of the image. You could still read what it said, but I’d prefer the whole thing to be in focus if possible.)
Click here to see one of the charts. (This is one of the smaller ones, which I was able to fit into one photo. Most needed two or three images.)
My dad was pleased with the results, and is about to post a CD of the photos to Pemberton Family World Wide. Watch this space to see what they do with them.
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