Would you like see your family’s black and white photographs in a new light? You may want to look into a service offered by the genealogy online resource MyHeritage. The company revolutionized the world of online genealogy web sites recently when the company announced that anyone could upload black-and-white photographs to MyHeritage.com and then the web site would AUTOMATICALLY convert each photo to a color image. This service was only available to people who had a full MyHeritage subscription. Now EVERYONE can obtain FREE and unlimited access to MyHeritage In Color™ from March 23 to April 23, 2020. Ordinarily only 10 photos can be colorized by users who do not have a Complete plan, but now, you can colorize as many photos as you’d like for free. A free online access subscription is required if you would like MyHeritage to add the photos to their extensive photograph collection.
Books and other texts can link us intellectually to the past but photographs and films of other eras take us into those past moments. Photographs from 1911 are not exactly rare but they are precious. Film showing motion was only just becoming more available in 1911 so a film of New York City in that year is a very special resource. A Swedish documentary film company sought to document the most celebrated sites in the world at that time. Look here to see its film of a New York street scene in 1911.
There are no films of Mount Prospect in 1911. The town was only just beginning to make a name for itself at that time. There are some photographs of the people and a business, however. Go to the Illinois Digital Archives to see children of Louis F. Busse and workers at the Wille Brothers Company in photographs taken around 1911. The original photographs are in the collection of the Mount Prospect Historical Society.
The Library now subscribes to National Geographic Virtual Library and National Geographic Kids (brought to you by the incredible database company, Gale Cengage). The Virtual Library contains every single page of every issue of National Geographic since it began publication in 1888, all issues of National Geographic Traveler, published since 2010, and over 300 books.
The incredible photography takes on an amazing glow. Take a look at the about the Photo Ark article for proof of that.Every Last One.
All articles can be saved to your computer, Google Drive, or saved to your folder in a Gale account. You can print them or email them to yourself or others.
Scanning all kinds of material has become a common task thanks to the availability of devices like Flip-Pal and special phone apps like Pic Scanner for iphones or Google PhotoScan for android phones. But what do you do with a book that is nearly 6 feet by 7 1/2 feet when opened? The British Library recently faced this challenge when it digitized its copy of the 1660 Klencke Atlas, one of the world’s largest books. The library made a video of the process available on YouTube recently. The Klencke Atlas contains 41 wall-sized, extremely rare maps. These maps reveal what Dutch cartographers knew about the world during the High Renaissance period. The public domain images of the atlas are part of the British Library’s Picturing Places online resource.
If you are looking for a digitized collection of items closer to home, go the the MPPL digital collection Dimensions of Life in Mount Prospect. This collection includes an image of an 1873 map of Mount Prospect.
The stories of our families are told through many forms of documents. Family photographs, however, are unique because they have visually captured moments in time that now only live as memories. A discarded photograph album lead a writer in New York to the story of black families that lived in the Crown Heights neighborhood of New York City during the middle of the 20th Century. This writer, Anne Correal, describes the journey she undertook to discover whose photographs they were and how the album was left forsaken on the street. Her article “Love and Black Lives, in Pictures Found on a Brooklyn Street” appeared in the New York Times in January 2017. It traces the paths that many African American families took from the Deep South to the North in an event known as the Great Migration. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson is a book in the Library’s collection which also illuminates this event in American history. There are now also other books and videos on display in the Library which document African American history. If you are interested in learning more about your own family’s history and managing your own family photographic collections, come talk to our Research Services staff who will help you get started.
Books and other texts can link us intellectually to the past but photographs and films of other eras take us into those past moments. Photographs from 1911 are not exactly rare but they are precious. Film showing motion was only just becoming more available in 1911 so a film of New York City in that year is a very special resource. A Swedish documentary film company sought to document the most celebrated sites in the world at that time. Look
The Library now subscribes to 
Scanning all kinds of material has become a common task thanks to the availability of devices like Flip-Pal and special phone apps like Pic Scanner for iphones or Google PhotoScan for android phones. But what do you do with a book that is nearly 6 feet by 7 1/2 feet when opened? The British Library recently faced this challenge when it digitized its copy of the 1660