Dick's Genealogy & History Corner

The Sunday Jan. 17th Democrat & Chronicle has 2 columns of the doings of at least 60 different Pedro clubs of Rochester. (More info. on the card game – Pedro.)

Trolley car #321 struck the lead carriage of a funeral procession at North Street and Central Avenue. The carriage, which was carrying the pall-bearers, was damaged and the driver, Henry Schiffler, was thrown to the ground but not hurt. The funeral was for Mary Wedow, who died Jan. 13th (age 61). The procession did continue on to Mt. Hope Cemetery. It was determined that a motorman trainee was driving the trolley car at the time of the accident.

Rochester Railway Company, Rochester & SodusBay Railway Co and Rochester & Eastern Rapid Railway Co. all voted at board meetings to consolidate into one company called New York State Railways with offices in Rochester. The new trolley line hoped to eventually extend their trolley lines from Buffalo to Albany; but that never happened.

The Italian Civic and Protective organization advised immigrants that there is a man that is soliciting people to become US citizens. He also offers to act as a witness for them in court for $2. The organization says they will help immigrants to become citizens, if they wish, for free.

Deninger’s at 335-345 North Street is having a special on “disk” talking machines. For only $1 down and $1 per week you can have a complete machine. Edison records are 35¢ and Excelsior records are only 15¢ (The ad does not say for how many weeks you have to pay the $1 per week.)

Bishop McQuaid

Rt. Rev. Bernard J. McQuaid dies on Monday Jan. 18th. He is remembered as the first Bishop of the Rochester Diocese. His body was lying in state in St. Patrick’s Cathedral from Wednesday to early Friday morning. A funeral mass took place on Friday (Jan. 22) conducted by Archbishop Farley from NYC. (For more details on Bishop McQuaid see this biography on Wikipedia.)

A meeting was held Sunday night Jan. 10 at National Theater to discuss what should be done about the unemployed men of Rochester. There isn’t any city agency at this time to help men find work. The only agency helping find employment is the YMCA. An employer said that it is a hard task to discharge a man who does good work because there isn’t enough work for him. Another speaker suggested that he would gladly double his own taxes to have men put to work cleaning and repairing the city streets.

On Jan 11th Patrolman George Alt received reprimand for being intoxicated and entering a saloon while on duty. It was also revealed that he had been borrowing money from saloon-keepers on his beat. He plead guilty of all charges and was moved to another precinct and put on night duty from 8PM to 4AM.

On Jan 11th McCurdy & Norwell Co. is advertising Ostrich Plumes from South Africa. An 11 inch plume sells for 98 cents; 18 inch for $4.98; up to a 27 inch plume for $14.98.

On Jan 15th a delegation from Buffalo, Tonawanda, North Tonawanda and Niagara Falls went to Washington and spoke with President Theodore Roosevelt about the pollution of the Great Lakes. Lake Erie was of great concern at the time.

An extra dividend on Kodak stock was voted by the Board of Directors. Two and a half percent on common stock will be paid on Feb. first. The regular annual dividend of 2.5% on common stock and 1.5% on preferred stock be paid on April first.

Edward Abeles will be at the Lyceum Theater Jan. 14-16 in the play “Brewster’s Millions.” It is about a person that will inherit many millions if they give away a large sum of money in a short period of time. Does that plot sound familiar? It should. Mr. Abeles made a movie of the same name in 1914. Another movie by the same name was made in 1921 starring Fatty Arbuckle. A female version (“Miss Brewster’s Millions”) was made in 1926. Then a British version was made in 1935. Another Hollywood version of  ”Brewster’s Millions” was made in 1945 starring Dennis O’Keefe. The British made another version of the movie in 1961 but this time with the title, “Three on a Spree.” And then in 1985 Hollywood again made “Brewster’s Millions” starring Richard Pryor.

s1220 Scanner

Thursday night at the RGS CIG meeting there was a demonstration of the Kodak s1220 scanner. I work at Kodak but I had not heard of this scanner before. It turns out that it is a commercial scanner and not one that most people could afford. Bruce Holroyd gave a great demonstration of the capabilities. He took a stack of various size photos and they were scanned in amazingly fast time to Jpeg images on the computer.  It scans sizes from 2 x 2.5 up to 8.5 x 34 inches (not a misprint; 34 inches long). There is a setting that can scan either the front, back or both sides at once. It can scan 30  4×6 photos  at 300 dpi in a minute. It will also scan at 600 dpi or 1200 dpi which is done through interpolation as the scanner actually is 600 dpi. I noticed that Mr. Holroyd only scanned at 300 dpi. Scanning at 600 dpi would take 4 times as long as scanning at 300 dpi. That is because it is twice as many dots on both the width and height. So it would end up scanning about 7.5  4 X 6 pictures per minute. Try that with a flat bed scanner and it is impossible.

Using my flat bed scanner, I always have to straighten the scans, afterwards. Mr. Holroyd didn’t have to get his pictures exactly square. The software would correct the photo if they were slightly askew. Plus he didn’t even bother to check which way he was putting the photos into the scanner as the software allowed him to rotate the scans afterwards. The software also does redeye removal and automatic enhancement and you get to see the before and after images before they can be saved. One of the scans came up with a white section in the corner. When I looked at the original photo, it was missing a corner of the photo and it still scanned. Some photos that had rips scanned perfectly, too. If you have photos mounded on cardboard (like those carte de visite photos), they can NOT be scanned on this scanner, as they are too thick.

The retail price for the scanner and software is $1795 so this would be used in commercial location to scan a customer’s shoebox of pictures. Then the scans could be saved on either a Picture CD, flashdrive, image card or anything that could be attached to the retail computer.

Mr. Holroyd mentioned that ther were 4 Wegmans location in Rochester that the s1220 scanners before they closed all their photo labs. They would have been behind the counter and scanned by a store employee. Also Walmart are getting a similar version of this scanner called a “Rapid Print Scanner” that attaches to the kiosks in SOME of their stores. This version allows the customer to do the scanning themselves but only saves the scans on Picture CDs. The scanner looks the same except it has a large tray to catch the scanned photos.  If anyone knows of where one of the scanners are located, please leave a comment of where and how much the charge is to scan .

More news from early January 1909.

The playgrounds of Rochester were featured in the January 1909 issue of the national magazine,  “The Playground.”  Articles in the magazine had interviews with Mayor Edgerton and the park’s department president, Alexander B. Lamberton. Also featured were pictures of the playgrounds at Number 26 & 14 schools, Brown Square and Seneca Park.

Two new vaudeville theaters will be built in Rochester. James H. Moore will build the Temple Theater on Clinton Avenue South. The Gordon Brothers will open the 1000 seat Family Theater on Clinton Avenue North. They will also show motion pictures besides having vaudeville acts.

Town of Pittsford taxes for 1909 were more than doubled to $9.96 per $1000 of assessed property value. This was because the building of a new street and a voting machine for East Rochester (then about half in the Town of Pittsford).

It is January and E. W. Edwards (department store) is having their annual white sale of towels, sheets, napkins, etc. Bleached bath towels are selling for 5 cents each and sheets for a double bed are 35 cents each.

A respectable funeral including a casket is available for $50 from C. E. Strauchen, undertaker on North Street.

Rochester Genealogical Society has moved their website. It is now at: www.nyrgs.org/. For now both the old and the new website address will work. They moved because of limitations on file size that could be uploaded to RootsWeb. There are plans to upload Church records that the Church Records Group has been filming. They will be available as PDF files so you can see copies of the original records. It also appears that the new site is faster.