You're going to laugh when you read this. At least I did, because the joke is on me. On Wednesday, I received the following e-mail:The Photo Preservation Center is announcing the 2008 Artistry of Genealogy Awards through an upcoming Businesswire news release and your site was mentioned. Congratulations and I hope the attention draws many more people to your excellent site. An advance copy of the release is posted on our Tales from the World of Photo Scanning Blog – www.blog.ScanMyPhotos.com. We will make sure to have your site hyperlinked on the official Businesswire release. Thanks for your commitment to also helping preserve families history and memories.
Well, I had never heard of this organization and to be quite frank, there were a couple of spelling and grammatical errors in the subject line and message, and the link embedded in the message led to a 404 error page--all normal indicators of a possible spam message. So I deleted the e-mail. Yes, I did!
On Thursday, Becky's congratulatory post at kinnexions popped up in my feed reader, followed by many others in the geneablogosphere, and suddenly I realized this was authentic! Sheepishly, I retrieved the e-mail from my trash folder and replied with a humble "thank you." Are you laughing at me yet? That's all right. I'm laughing right along with you!
Here is the correct link that will take you to the blog, and here is the press release on Yahoo! through Businesswire. I'm not going to repeat the whole message here as most of you have probably read it on other blogs, but I did want to mention a few things.
First of all, thank you to the Photo Preservation Center for creating these awards and to all those who voted for AnceStories as Best Personal Genealogy Blog (Renee Zamora of Renee's Genealogy Blog also received this award). I'm sorry that I didn't recognize the award for what it was at first glance!
Secondly, congratulations to all my fellow award winners! I'm honored to be listed among them. Every one of the recipients was familiar to me at first glance, with the exception of Favorite Genealogy Research Guide: Genealogy Research Guides, Tips and Online Records. After investigating this site, I slapped my forehead and said, "Oh, it's Joe!" Yes, Joe Beine of www.deathindexes.com and Genealogy Roots Blog. ResearchGuides.net is the front door to his portal of wonderful pages of links to online records. The other one that seemed at first unfamiliar but turned out to be part of Illya D'Addezio's conglomeration of sites (think GenealogyToday) was Family Tree Connection, which won Most Popular Genealogy Database.
One thing I learned from all this (besides not to look a gift horse in the mouth!) was that April is The Great American Photo Scanning Month! As the hostess of Scanfest, I think that's simply terrific! In honor of that event, ScanMyPhotos.com has created the following offer:
Throughout April, ScanMyPhotos.com is providing free photo scans to all members of four leading social networking sites; subscribers to Flickr, MySpace, Blogger and Facebook can have up to 1,000 4x6" photos scanned to DVD without charge when they mail their pictures to ScanMyPhotos.com and pay $19.95 for return S&H, along with the downloadable order form.
This sounds like a sweet deal, and would work wonderfully for all those modern photos you have sitting around in boxes that need to be digitized. As for the antique or one-of-a-kind old family photos or documents, I urge you to join me and scan them during Scanfest (Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday this coming week) and Spring Break Scan-a-thon, currently in progress. If you can't make it this week, the April Scanfest will be held Sunday, April 27th from 11 AM - 2 PM, Pacific Daylight Time.
You are more forthcoming than I am Miriam but if truth be told, I didn't jump for joy when I first got the email either. My first thought was, "yeah, right". I didn't delete the email but I did let it sit in my inbox for a while until I had some time to investigate the source of it.
ReplyDeleteIt's sad, really, that we have become such skeptics due to all the spam and come-ons we get via email. But who wants to be suckered in to something? Ya gotta stay on your toes!
I didn't realize Joe's blog was in the group of honorees either.
I've seriously considered sending in a batch of my photos to this company for scanning but I'm afraid they'd get lost in the mail. If I could walk into a store and have them scanned while I wait I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I'm not trusting enough to send them thousands of miles away for scanning. Oh well. I guess I'll just be a Scanfester for life!
ScanMyPhotos.com was one of the sites that I investigated when trying to decide whether or not I wanted to send out "modern" photos for scanning. I still haven't decided whether to do it or not primarily for the same reason as Jasia - fear of the pictures getting lost in transition either to or from the processing facility.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations, Miriam, on a well
ReplyDeletedeserved award!
Congratulations :)
ReplyDeleteThank you, all!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations Miriam!
ReplyDeleteWe all know the old saying, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." In this case I'm happy it didn't apply but I understand your skepticism.
Congrats!!
ReplyDelete