I have not posted anything new for a while not because I had nothing new to report but rather because there was too much going on. My parents arrived for a visit and we had a great time together. One of the things I had asked my mother to do was to bring as many old photos as she could. She did not disappoint!

I started scanning and cataloging all these terrific pictures and it's going to take a long time to get through everything. The method I've been using is to place as many photos as I can on the scanner and scan them as an entire page:



I scan them at a high DPI on the A4 paper setting so that I can use the entire scanner. Then I flip them over and scan the backs:



The next step in the process is to start cropping and aligning the images correctly and then saving them in the proper directories in my photo filing system. That's a lot of work, but I really look forward to it.

Last week I received Maureen Taylor's (the photo detective) book "Uncovering Your Ancestry through Family Photograph" from Amazon (where's my second book Bezos?) and started reading through that. Even though my photos are not very old I have been learning some research methodology and a few helpful tips about how to catalog and record what is on them.

Here's one of my favorite photos so far:



It's a photo of my great-grandfather Moshe Zinberg's grave site in Beltsy, Moldova (previously Romania and also Russia). I don't know who took it. I don't know when it was taken. I don't know how it ended up in my hands (I will have to ask my grandmother but my guess is her mother brought it with her on her visit to Israel many years ago). I don't know who the two men in the picture are but my best guess is that they are cemetery workers. I don't even know if the grave is still there!

What I do know is the following:
1) The plot is very large and fenced, which is not common.
2) The name in Hebrew would be pronounced "Tzimbarg". What does it say in Russian?
3) From what I could tell he was a VIP (Ish Ha'Tov) and a Cohen. It says he is Moshe, son of Aaron the Cohen.
4) There is a small picture of Moshe at the top of the tombstone.
5) There is a bunch of stuff in Russian which I couldn't read.
6) I couldn't figure out his date of death either (too fuzzy when I zoom in - I will try with a magnifying glass on the original).

I also scanned the back and sent it to two of Moshe's grandchildren to see if they could read it and translate it for me:



Does anyone know what it says?

I can't wait to get into all the other photos. Some are complete mysteries...