Adventures in Genealogy

A few years ago I was bitten by the genealogy bug, and I joined Ancestry and started putting together a family tree. My grandfather's name was Joseph A. Barthet, and he was born on October 23, 1884, in Donaldsonville, LA. He died in New Orleans in 1966. 


Apparently, there was another Joseph A. Barthet, possibly my great grandfather, who was a photographer in Labadieville in the late 1800's. The Louisiana Digital Archives has several photographs by the "Barthet Brothers Photography Studio" in its collection. The photographer credited with some of the shots was Joseph Barthet.

So a reasonable person would think my grandfather, who was an auto mechanic (he worked on Greyhound buses) was somehow related to Joseph Barthet, the photographer. My grandfather was from Labadieville, as shown on some old family documents I have in the family file folder, and the photographer worked in Labadieville.

This was way back in the early days of photography. I remember being told that my grandfather was at one time a traveling photographer who would go from town to town and take pictures of people at fairs and carnivals. 

Surely he is related to the Barthet who opened a photography studio with his brother in Labadieville. Either way, I found that interesting, given the fact that I have been a photographer all of my life. Here are some Barthet Brothers photographs in the state archives.Click on the image below to make them larger.

 

Joseph Barthet was also listed as Postmaster in Labadieville in 1928, but he died in 1933 and had to be replaced. 

Attenuating Patch Cords and other Dinosaurs

Years ago, from time to time, I needed to use an attenuating patch cord to dub the sound from an audio source to a tape recorder. It was about three feet long, black, with a mini-plug on each end. It would transfer the audio signal from the earphone jack of a tape player to the microphone jack of a tape recorder, lessening the strength of the audio along the way so as not to overpower the microphone level.

Now I have dozens of old cassette tapes with interviews, radio broadcasts and other memorable stuff, and I need to take those analog signals and transfer them into the computer. Well, after looking for my 30 year old attenuating patch cord which I bought at Radio Shack for a buck or two, I couldn't find it, so I thought I would just order one off the internet.

Man, am I getting old. Searching for an attenuating patch cord brought in lots of results, but nothing that even resembled what I used to know one as. Half of the search results were for things that I had never heard of, the other half was for professional audio processing, costing ten times more than I wanted to (or expected to) pay for one. There were even optical attenuating patch cables. I tried to imagine what that would be for, but I gave up.

But I did get a laugh out of one webpage that defined the function of an attenuating patch cord as a cable that "attenuates" a signal only in one direction, down. It does not attenuate the sound level upward. Well, duh. 

Photo Processing Technical Notes

This picture of Tugy's Bar in the Southern Hotel building in Covington was taken in the mid-1970's, some 45 years ago. 

 

Click on the image to make it larger.

 Here are some technical notes on the processing of that photo:

The picture of Tugy's Bar at the top is just a small portion of a decades old slide of the Southern Hotel. The slide was dirty, dusty, and its color was deteriorating. Here's the process I went through to get it cleaned up a little.

1. Zoomed in on Tugy's Bar, cropped out the rest of the Southern Hotel building.
2. Ran a sharpening filter to help sharpen the focus.
3. Blue splotches were everywhere, hundreds of them, the result of the color dyes breaking down. Instead of trying to color correct the hundreds of blue splotches, I switched the whole thing over to black and white, making the blue splotches gray. Then I selected out specific areas and blurred them to smooth out the splotches. 
4. In a quick three hour re-coloring session, I tinted all the picture elements ( the buildings, the cars, the street, the trees) back to a natural color.
5. I retraced the letters on the signs. 
6. Then I ran the whole thing through a watercolor painting filter to increase the artistic look and take out the last few slide imperfections.

 

Here's a procession of the different image processing stages