Squadron History Presentation

I presented the results of my research on the USAF Troop Carrier squadon
my father was a member of during the Korean "conflict" the the surviving
members at their 52nd reunion this afternoon.
For any of you who have considered learning what your fathers did and
the men they served with, this is a worthwhile undertaking.
Be prepared to invest time and money to do the job properly, however.
I had alloted three months, which is really an accurate guesstimate, but
I did not allow for interruptions, so I was rushed and did not have as
polished a presentation as I had hoped to have.

The United States Air Force Historical Archives are housed at Maxwell
AFB, AL. These folks provide excellent service and are responsive to
inquiries.
From a bare request including a squadron number and dates, I was
provided a list of microfilm roll numbers and frames along with a brief
description of their contents. Based on this information, I ordered six
rolls of 16mm microfilm. Each roll contains 2000 images and costs $30,
include payment with your order. Allow four to six weeks for delivery.
I don't have access to a 16mm microfilm reader, so I looked in the
yellow pages for businesses that would convert the microfilm to digital
images. I had all six rolls converted. This was a rush job, so I paid
for overnight FedEx both ways. The 12,000 images were burned onto a DVD
and referenced by roll and frame. Just under 1 GB, images in *.tif
format. Basic price was $0.06/image. $50 for the DVD.

From the lists provided by USAFHA, I had 5983 images to review.
I decided the easiest thing to do was organize the rolls and frames by
month and year, so I spent the last five days reading the images, and
placing the individual files in the appropriate folders.

Once I had the images sorted in this manner, I went back and made notes
and arranged the notes into a timeline for each year.

The Air Force (and probably the other services, also) have a requirement
for each their units to submit monthly histories up the chain of command.

By doing this timeline, it has also enable me to organize my father's
photos by date and location. Rosters included in the unit histories help
identify individuals referred to by nicknames or last names written on
the back of the photos.

My project for next year's reunion is to meet with as many of the
survivors as possible during the next year and scan as many of their
photographs as I can. I hope to obtain photos of everyone who served at
the time and compile an album for their families.

The unit histories are brief by their nature, but provide starting
points for jobbing their memories and getting the vets to elaborate on
the details. It also prompts them to remember other interesting stories.
Take a video cam to record their responses.

My father died six years ago, by my family and I still take my mother to
the reunions each year. These were the people that were my parents
closest friends for much of their lives.

My father died six years ago, by my family and I still take my mother to
the reunions each year. These were the people that were my parents
closest friends for much of their lives.

Good job. This kind of history is important, and so easily lost from
generation to generation. In my family, a dispute in the 1930s caused
a schism which has meant, to this day, we have no contact with the
Honeck side of our family.

I therefore spent the last few years of my father's life (he died in
'93) researching our family tree, with his help. Most of the time he
thought the pursuit was silly -- but there were some poignant moments
and we made some great memories. And, of course, we learned a lot
about our family history.

Later, when he was dying, I made him sit in front of a video camera
while I interviewed him for over 3 hours. It was so painful that I've
never watched it, and probably never will.

But my grand-kids will. And that's what counts.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

"john smith" wrote in message
...
I presented the results of my research on the USAF Troop Carrier squadon
my father was a member of during the Korean "conflict" the the surviving
members at their 52nd reunion this afternoon.
For any of you who have considered learning what your fathers did and
the men they served with, this is a worthwhile undertaking.

Snip Worthwhile Post

My late Dad's visit to Italy in the 1940's is chronicled in a book called
"Thunder In The Appenines."

There are even a couple of pics we were always pretty sure were him "back in
the day."

Jay B

john smith wrote:
My project for next year's reunion is to meet with as many of the
survivors as possible during the next year and scan as many of their
photographs as I can.

This is a neat project. Here are some ideas so that the work you are
doing now will last a long time into the future. You might already be
doing some or all of these things.

Do these scans in some uncompressed format, like TIFF or PNG, and at
the highest resolution you can. You might convert to JPG or reduce
the resolution for presentation, but keep the original files around
somewhere. If possible, attach the basic metadata (date of picture,
who's in the picture, location, etc) _directly_ to the image file; I
know PNG lets you include text strings in the file and I'm pretty sure
TIFF can as well. If you keep this stuff in a separate file, eventually
it and the pictures will get split up.

The unit histories are brief by their nature, but provide starting
points for jobbing their memories and getting the vets to elaborate
on the details. It also prompts them to remember other interesting
stories. Take a video cam to record their responses.

You may want to also take an audio tape recorder, or at least record
the video soundtrack to audio tape later. So far, audio tape formats
seem to be lasting longer than video tape formats; 20 years from now,
there's a good chance that the audio tape will still be easily playable
but the video tape will not be.

Matt Roberds

In article eff_g.4613$uJ2.3404@dukeread03,
wrote:

john smith wrote:
My project for next year's reunion is to meet with as many of the
survivors as possible during the next year and scan as many of their
photographs as I can.

This is a neat project. Here are some ideas so that the work you are
doing now will last a long time into the future. You might already be
doing some or all of these things.

Do these scans in some uncompressed format, like TIFF or PNG, and at
the highest resolution you can. You might convert to JPG or reduce
the resolution for presentation, but keep the original files around
somewhere. If possible, attach the basic metadata (date of picture,
who's in the picture, location, etc) _directly_ to the image file; I
know PNG lets you include text strings in the file and I'm pretty sure
TIFF can as well. If you keep this stuff in a separate file, eventually
it and the pictures will get split up.

The unit histories are brief by their nature, but provide starting
points for jobbing their memories and getting the vets to elaborate
on the details. It also prompts them to remember other interesting
stories. Take a video cam to record their responses.

You may want to also take an audio tape recorder, or at least record
the video soundtrack to audio tape later. So far, audio tape formats
seem to be lasting longer than video tape formats; 20 years from now,
there's a good chance that the audio tape will still be easily playable
but the video tape will not be.

Thanks for those recommendations, Matt.
I didn't know about .tif format being uncompressed.
My brother videotaped my presentation this year. I will get a copy and
run it through Quicktime to separate the audio.

john smith wrote:
I didn't know about .tif format being uncompressed.

TIFF is kind of like a standard "container" that can have various kinds
of image data in it. The more common kinds of data are not compressed,
though.

I am also being a little sloppy and saying "compressed" to mean "lossy
compression". Lossy compression is what JPEG images and MP3 audio files
do - they throw away the pieces that humans will have a hard time
perceiving in order to get a small file size. This is great for Web
sites or other situations where you don't have all the storage space
or network bandwidth in the world.

Lossless compression is what GIF and PNG images and ZIP archive files do.
They do some math tricks to make the file size smaller, but when you
uncompress the file, what comes out is always an exact bit-for-bit copy
of what went in. This is better for archival purposes; the compression
helps it take up less disk space, but somebody later can always get back
exactly what you scanned in or recorded.

Matt Roberds

wrote:
john smith wrote:
I didn't know about .tif format being uncompressed.

TIFF is kind of like a standard "container" that can have various kinds
of image data in it. The more common kinds of data are not compressed,
though.

TIF can do various compressions. The most common is perhaps LZW
(lossless).