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Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Quick Tip #32: Found a bad scan? Look again

January 28, 2022 By Janine Adams Leave a Comment

Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. I’ve benefited more than once from this one!

Found a bad scan? Look again.

If you’re like me, you’ve encountered some documents that were scanned poorly. It can be so disappointing to locate a document, then realize you can’t read everything on it. Here’s what I suggest when that happens.

If the poorly scanned document you found is on Ancestry, see if you can find it on FamilySearch (and vice versa). Documents found on both sites were probably scanned (and indexed) by different people and there may be a better scan on the other site. If you can’t find it on a search, try browsing.

Early on in my researching I found a terrible scan on Ancestry for the 1910 census my grandmother was on. I didn’t think to look for it on FamilySearch and when finally did, nine years later, I found a beautiful scan.

Looking elsewhere for a better scan can be worth a few extra minutes of effort!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Filed Under: Genealogy tips Tagged With: quick tips, research

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about me

I'm Janine Adams, a professional organizer and a genealogy enthusiast. I love doing family history research, but I find it's very easy for me to get overwhelmed and not know where to turn next. So I'm working hard to stay organized and feel in control as I grow my family tree.

In this blog, I share my discoveries and explorations, along with my organizing challenges (and solutions). I hope by sharing what I learn along the way I'll be able to help you stay focused and have fun while you do your research, too.

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