Photos: website

February 20, 2020

New Online Photo Album

After many months spent trying to determine how to design a new and improved photo album for my website, it’s finally ready. All 3,878 photos are online. View the album at http://webjmd.com/pics/album2.html. This is what it looks like.

I wanted to keep the page fairly clean and the layout simple. At the top is a link to the main page of the website along with my contact information. If someone sees a picture of interest, I always hope they’ll get in touch with me so we can swap information. There’s also a link to this page for an explanation of how the picture list is arranged.

There are nine columns of information:

1. Each row is numbered sequentially.

2. ID: My identification number for each picture.

3. Image: Clicking on this small picture brings up a larger version in a separate browser window.

4. Approx Year: This is my guess on the year the picture was taken. Keep in mind that some of my guesses might be better than others!

5. Pic Title: The title I assigned based on who is in the picture.

6. Description: Explains who is in the picture, when they were born, maybe where they lived, and any other information about the photo.

7. Category: This loosely refers to where those in the picture were from. Or, if they lived “away”, then it’s an indication of where their family was from. There are 4 categories:

a. Alleghany: families with ties to Alleghany Co, NC.

b. Floyd: families with ties to the eastern part of Carroll Co, VA, and the western part of Floyd Co.

c. Grayson: families with ties to the western part of Carroll Co, VA, Galax, and generally the southern part of Grayson Co.

d. Wilkes: families with ties to Wilkes Co, NC, with most from the eastern half of the county.

8. Source: This is where the picture came from. Very few pictures originated with me, and I’m very grateful to all those who have shared their family photos with me over the years. Now I have the opportunity to share them with others.

9. Added: This is the date when I added the picture to the list.

If this is all the page offered, that would be nice. But that’s NOT all! There are extra features that make it easier to find and look for pictures of the people you’re interested in. One feature is the ability to sort. Every column heading has a small sort button in the upper right. This small triangle points up or down. Click on it to sort the list by that column in ascending or descending order. In this example, the list is sorted by the Approx Year column.

Most columns also have a filter box below the column heading. If you want to find every picture with the word “Perry”, type that in the description filter box, and the table automatically filters to show only the pictures that include that word in the description. You can combine filters, too. In this example, I’ve filtered the Description with “Perry” and the Category with “Floyd”. The net result is 23 photos as indicated by the number in the top row of the Image column.

Many people might choose to mostly use the Category field alone. If you have ancestors in Wilkes Co, NC, you might choose to enter “Wilkes” in that filter to view only those pictures. (There are 1,872 of them!)

When using the Description column to sort the list, there are certain key words that I used when writing the descriptions. Enter one of these phrases to filter the list:

· wwii – For pictures taken during WWII.

· military – For pictures showing someone in uniform or otherwise related to the military.

· school class – Any group of kids who appear to be gathered for a school class photo.

· Cem. – Usually a picture of a headstone. *Note the period (.) at the end.

· Unknown – Any picture that includes someone I can’t identify is listed with “Unknown” in the description. I hope people will contact me if they’re able to identify someone!

One neat feature is that the year in the Approx Year column will be blue if it’s before 1900. From 1900 to the present, they are shown in red.

If necessary, you can stretch the column widths to make the columns fit your screen better. Just click on one of the vertical column lines and drag it left or right. Below, I stretched the columns so they are narrower. This might be useful if the columns don’t look right on a small screen such as a phone.

At the top of the list, the blue button can be used to clear the filters and reload the page. You can also unfilter the list by clearing text from each of the filter boxes.

I’ve successfully viewed this page using Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and MS Edge. The only browser it will not work in is Internet Explorer. If you’re part of the 3% who are still using IE, take a minute and download Chrome for free. The page also works on a phone and tablet, but the text can be kind of small on a phone.

I made this using the Tabulator JavaScript code available online. This was a good way for me to begin to learn how javascript works.

I said at the beginning that there are 3,878 pictures online as of today, 2/20/2020. I have another 470 pictures scanned, catalogued, and in the database that are not online. These are mostly newer pictures that genealogy-minded people wouldn’t be interested in seeing. Here is a breakdown of the pictures by decade.

This is a great example of the classic bell curve.

· The peak is at the 1940s with over 1,000 pictures from that decade online.

· There are 211 pictures that I’ve estimated were taken before 1900.

· The earliest picture is from around 1840, and it’s actually a drawing instead of a photo. It’s a picture of Jeremiah Cleveland (1774-1845) that I found online. It’s important to remember that cameras were invented in the late 1830s, and very few people had their picture taken before 1850.

I still have a few hundred pictures that I need to add to the list, and I hope to get to that over the next few months. Now that I have the presentation side (mostly) taken care of, I can spend more time on the pictures themselves and on the genealogy behind them.

If you have any pictures that I should add here, let me know! And, again, if you can identify any of the “Unknown” photos, I’d appreciate hearing from you.

Comments? jason@webjmd.com