Archive for January 5th, 2018

Great Software for Transcribing Documents!

Yakking with your Friends on Facebook about how they get stuff done can pay off in lots of new ideas!

Thanks to Carol A Bowen Stevens, author of the Reflections From the Fence blog, I downloaded a very helpful software application, appropriately named “Transcript.”

Transcript allows  you to place an image in the top half of the screen, type the transcription on the lower half, and save it in .rtf format, recognized by most word processing programs, including Microsoft Word.

Here is an example, below:

This is a Screen shot of Transcript showing Revolutionary War era, George Stocking’s tombstone and the transcription.

The software is very easy to use.

Click on the image icon on the middle row above, choose an image to load from your hard drive, and then began typing in the lower part of the screen.

Oh my goodness, be still my heart!  Where has this software been for the several years I’ve been transcribing documents!?

After getting this far, my next question was, can I make it work with the indexing that I’m currently doing for the Sumner County (Kansas) Historical & Genealogical Society’s Pioneer Settler files?

For me, the answer is a resounding “yes!”

It will work, not only for ‘plain’ documents, but it will also work for transcribing ‘stuff’ that I want to drop (copy and paste) into an Excel or Google Docs sheet.

To use it for transcribing stuff to put into a spreadsheet, type what you want into the first cell, then hit tab, then type the next word for the next cell and hit tab.  In other words, type for the first cell, hit tab, type for the second cell, hit tab, and so on.

Then copy and paste into the spreadsheet!

The only thing that would make it really, really awesome, would be if you could type directly into the bottom part that was a spreadsheet!

Now, rather than have TWO different programs open, looking from one to another and moving from one to another, it’s all right there, in one program!

The program is free for personal use, but is inexpensive to register!  Click here to try this awesome program: http://www.jacobboerema.nl/en/RegFeatures.htm

I love this program!

Day Four – Memory Four – Wading in a Buffalo Wallow

The challenge:

What is one of your favorite childhood memories involving water.  Preferably not in a swimming pool?  What was fun about it? What was special about it? Why do you remember it? Where were you?

I’m going to try to write up 365 memories this year.

So far I’ve been 2 hours late and a day behind.

It will probably get worse before January is over!

So lately I’ve been thinking about buffalo wallows.

The backyard I played in while growing up was a cow pasture.

Before it was a cow pasture, it was prairie. There were coyotes, antelope, prairie chickens, pheasant, quail – and buffalo.,

Our pasture had quite a few large depressions on a hillside between two creeks. Water gathered in the wallows and it would stay there for several days after a rain.

We loved to splash and wade in those buffalo wallows, squishing grass and mud between our toes with the water almost up to our knees. (we were pretty short then…)

Every spring, those buffalo wallows were full of little pollywogs or tadpoles.

We’d gather them up in canning jars, and cart them back to the house, where over several days’ time, we’d watch them turn into little baby frogs.

Once they turned into frogs we’d take them outside where they were thoroughly admired, their jumping skills assessed, and turn them loose.

And when the next spring rain came along, we’d start all over again with more pollywogs.

Caution:  I don’t know if any children will read this, or parents who might try to find pollywogs for their kids to watch grow, but when I googled Pollywogs to try to learn exactly how long it would take on average for a pollywog to turn into a frog, I found that frogs and tadpoles can transmit diseases to humans.

Two scary diseases, such as salmonella and tuberculosis.  (Check out the article here: http://frogsource.com/article/from-frogs-humans-disease-transmission

The article indicates that the salmonella can be a lot riskier for younger children, so I feel pretty lucky that we didn’t end up with any bad side effects from all the fun we had with pollywogs!