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Hope your week has gone well! We have family moving in with us and we're trying to consolidate our belongings so I thought I'd share our tried and true methods for scanning documents and sharing scans.

I'm scanning family papers so we can toss less valuable papers. WARNING: do not try this at home without a Backup Plan. Please don't rely on a digital copy of your treasures without putting a backup plan in place.

I've scanned papers and photos on and off for the last twenty years (before my change to a Mac computer) so I've stuck with a Windows PC-based scanning software for all my photo and paper scanning jobs--it's called Irfanview, and it's FREE. You can download it at Irfanview.com and here are some selling points:

• Fast and compact (just 5 MB)
• Freeware for non-commercial use
• Supports Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10
• 32 and 64 bit version
• Multi-language support
• Unicode support
• Designed to be simple, but powerful

The feature I use the most is Batch scanning. Whichever scanner I happen to be using, I tell Irfanview to import the scans in batches and I give the batch a name. So if I'm scanning my son's 2nd grade papers, I name the batch "Mansfield Nathan 2nd grade 0001.tif" and then I start feeding papers into the scanner and Irfanview names every paper or photo in that batch with this file name, only changing the 4 digit number with each incremental scan. This way, I can scan a lot of documents without stopping to name each file individually.

I scan my files as .tif files for the highest quality resolution, but then I save a duplicate copy as a lower resolution file (usually some type of jpeg) for sharing on social media, emailing to family etc.

Even with lower resolution file sizes, I use WeTransfer.com to send multiple files to family. WeTransfer has a free version, but I use them enough I pay for a subscription. Here's a link to WeTransfer's pricing. You can send up to 2GB free each time you do an email transfer and if that's enough for your purposes, stick with the free plan.

New and Updated Listings

DNA Bioservices - Australia

Slovak Genealogy Assistance - Slovakia and Czechia

Lots of Alabama listings are being updated this month

Best with your family history projects!