Lacy Borgeson

History 2710

April 21, 2006

Service Learning Report:

Borgeson Family Photos

For my service learning project I decided to take family photos from my dad’s family and put them on CD with captions explaining the pictures. My reasons for doing this are first to make these pictures available to larger numbers of my family and to make it possible for the younger generations to understand the who, what, and where of the pictures as far as it is known. My dad’s family has an unending amount of pictures taken before and during his and his sisters childhood’s that the rest of us can only guess at why the picture was taken. Without documentation for these pictures they are of little use to future generations in helping to understand the lives of their predecessors.

A lot of the pictures I have used in this project were taken before most of my cousins or I were born and while we may be able to recognize the people in the pictures thanks to distinguishing characteristics I feel that we are missing out on an important part of our family history by not knowing what is going on in the pictures. Therefore my intended audiences for this project are the younger generations of the Andrew Alvin Sr. and Johanna Borgeson family and the generation that are to come.

To complete this project my two major resources have been my Aunt Nell and my father (Andrew Alvin Jr.) My Aunt Nell provided me with all the pictures that she has scanned onto the computer over the years and information about the pictures. My dad was a big help as he spent five hours helping me sort through the pictures identifying people, places, events, and of course the animals. Without the work my Aunt Nell had already done I would not have been able to have used so many pictures, as a great deal of my time would have gone to scanning the pictures into the computer. My father was an invaluable resource of information that really made the project possible; there is no way that I could have labeled all of those pictures without his help.

Without including the time spent in writing this paper, I’ve spent between 15 and 17 hours working on this project. Looking at what I’ve completed it doesn’t seem like I have worked that many hours on this project but with formatting issues and the general work load of the project I have. When I first started putting the pictures together I had a lot of difficulty trying to decide what computer programs to use and how to best format the pictures and captions. Once I figured out the program and formatting things went much smother but after I had a caption with every picture I realized that I needed a better way to organize the pictures than just throwing them into the document in any random order. As you can see, or I hope you can see the photos are organized by year into eight different categories: individual pictures, groups of two, groups of three and four, large groups, pictures of Santaquin, Andrew A. and Johannas’ house and yard, the farm, and the family animals. After I finished the picture captions I added short biographies of early family members for background information. To write these bios I read documents prepared and written by family members. Though I only included a fraction of the information that can be found about these individuals I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know about my ancestors. Although I knew some basic details of their lives I didn’t know what life was like for them in their home countries that made them decide to immigrate to America, what it was like for them to travel across the country, or what life was like for them in Utah once they arrived in as great of detail.

My schedule for this project wasn’t that great, I left the bulk of the project till four days before it was due. Although I worked on my Service-Learning Project for a half an hour here and there I didn’t start working very hard on it till Monday of this week. I spent five hours sorting pictures with my dad on Monday, seven figure out how I was going to format the project and labeling the pictures, two hours on Wednesday labeling, and an hour on Thursday organizing the pictures. Granted this isn’t the best plan but if you are like me and a good part of the world it is the only way to work.

Without this project I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project, in almost everything I’ve done technology has been involver. I even used a website to format my works cited page (easybib.com is a great site.) One of my goals for this project was to make family pictures available to my large family inexpensively. If I were to create this document on the computer and then print it I would spend many hours printing and mailing these documents to family members not to mention the expense of that proposal. Because of technology I can put the document onto a CD to send to my family member or in some case for family members living outside the U.S. send as an email attachment. I used Windows Fax and Print Viewer to sort through the pictures with my dad and then labeled the pictures in Microsoft Word. After I finished labeling and organizing the pictures in Microsoft Word I converted the document to an Adobe PDF to make the pictures more accessible. While not everyone has Microsoft Word (Microsoft Works is also common and incompatible with Word) on their computer, most people have or can download for free Adobe’s program to read PDFs. Another important technological tool I used was my USB. I don’t know what I would have done without my USB plug. I used my USB to transfer information from my computer to the schools computer to use programs that I don’t have. The USB was a major time saver as it is much faster to save information on it than to send it as an email attachment. Although I found email to slow to transport the information I was using it was a great communication tool to help me contact the people I need to talk to about my project.

Although this is the last of my project for this class I plan to continue on with this project. It is a little bit daunting when I think that with the pictures I have labeled already I have barely scratched the surface of the vast amounts of photos my family has that can be documented in the same way. My dad’s family still has a ton more picture that I would like to document and my mom’s family has a great deal as well. I would like to continue working on this project because I feel that is important part of family history. While these photos may not tell the entire story they are a vital part of understanding the people in them and what they went through, in my opinion. I don’t want the future generations of my family to look at these pictures and see nothing but a bunch of people they do not recognize or care about. I want the future generations to look at these pictures and see a story, a real person they can identify with instead of seeing nothing.

Through this project I have gained a greater respect for my aunt and all that she does to preserve our family history and share it with others. Even though it at times felt tedious to sit and look at pictures for five hours I really enjoyed the time with my dad. I learned a lot about him and his family that I didn’t know. Yes I learned facts that I didn’t know before from the vast reservoir of information he keeps stored in his head but most importantly I learned what the people were like in the pictures. Yes you can read about people and learn what they did with their lives but picture give you access to what their nature was like and many other things that can’t be found in words.