Creating This Website



What a project this turned out to be! I had NO idea what I was getting myself into! Every photograph had to be worked on. Some required extensive restoration.

Most of the photographs were glued to notebook pages, and they were somewhat wrinkled (though not as bad as the wrinkles on the paper) and they didn't always scan clearly. Also, if the scanner settings were right for the paper, they were wrong for the photographs, so I scanned everything twice (usually more than that) with different settings.

My original plan was to use large, high-resolution scans, and not put the website on the internet at all. It was to be burned onto CDs or DVDs and distributed to family. Several people who saw the first pages told me to put it "out there" for more people to see. That meant every image had to be reduced in dimensions and in resolution.

After all the (seemingly endless) adjustments to brightness, contrast, saturation, color balance (yes, color! - some of the photos had a greenish cast and many were very yellow) taking out those nasty blue reflections, etc., etc., it was a relatively simple matter to reduce the size and resolution, but it was time-consuming, because there are so many images. (Each notebook page is an image; each handwritten page is an image, in addition to all the photographs.)





Two examples of needing different settings for the photos and the notebook paper.




Just a few of the typing corrections I felt compelled to clean up.




Below, you can see the blue reflection that appeared in every scan of this one, simply because the scanner light is directly in front of the piece being scanned. I jumped through some fancy hoops on this one! But I ended up with a beautiful wedding portrait, after spending hours on it!




An apology to all who have dial-up connections. There's no way this could be anything but awful, waiting and waiting for the images to load.

A CD (or DVD) version with high resolution images is available. It includes all the original full-size unretouched scans of Arthur's handwritten pages, all the original scans of Marjory's pages (in case you want to see how they looked before I repaired things), a searchable version of all the narrative and genealogy pages. (Thank you to Dale Travis for the Word document), unretouched scans of the photographs, and more. You can reach me at the email address at the bottom of this page.

Sure, I could have just pushed everything through the scanner and posted pictures that were too dark or too light, or with so many reflections you could hardly see the image. I just wasn't satisfied with that. So I put in the hours, and for the most part, enjoyed every hour spent on it. (Did NOT enjoy the computer freeze-ups!)

If you are family (or not) and have better copies of any of the photographs, I would be happy to replace these with better ones. You would need to send me a high-quality JPG.

At the time I'm writing this (Feb, 2007) the site still isn't done. There are many more photographs to work on and post. Such as Ada (then Pannwitt) with Iva Zimmerman and Mrs. Broder in Broder's Confectionery in Decatur (1913) where Ada worked for a time. Or George and Anna Maria Lutz Zimmerman who both came to the U.S. from Germany in the 1830s. George Zimmerman, Sr. was born in 1810 near Zweibruecken, Rhein Kreis, Germany. He came to the United States in 1833. Anna Maria Lutz was born in Ornbach, Hessen Kassel, Germany, and came to the United States in 1835. They were married in the U.S. in 1836. Their family home was north of Perry, in Pike County, Illinois. And we have a picture of them! But that's for later... Family names include not only Zimmerman and Pannwitt, but Kettelkamp, Jockisch, and Kallenbach, and many more. So much to do yet!

    — Delores


Below:
Use the page number links below to navigate to other chapters.
The "Memoirs of A.D. Zimmerman " heading is the link to the Home page.

>> You are now on The Making of This Website page. <<