I’ve been slack on blogging because I’ve been doing lots of actual work – genealogical and otherwise. Yesterday, I finally made the hour drive to to poke around in Forsyth County’s land records. Though I haven’t yet found where my ancestor George W. West actually bought his land, I did find where he was selling it off in the early 1890’s. I also found quite a few mortgages (with collateral like a dun colored cow and a 12 year old mare mule named Mary.)
Judging by the lots he was selling, I think his land – and the possible George W. West family burial site – has been found!
But the real star of the show yesterday was my TurboScan app. I use this nifty little iPhone app when I’m feeling too cheap to make copies – which is all the time. After finding every West-related land record I could get my paws on, and backing into some McDaniel and Gravitt land records along the way – I ended up making over 30 copies. This would have cost me $15 if I’d used their copy machine.
Long story short, TurboScan replaces the copy machine by letting you scan a document simply by taking three pictures of it (with flash.) From there you can store it on your phone in a nice organized album or email it to yourself in .jpeg or .pdf format, or even print it if you have a printing app. (I go into detail here at my guest post at the Brooklyn Ancestry blog.)
On the downside, sometimes when you try to get in a hurry and scan too much text at one time you end up scanning your shoes…
If you’re an iPhone devotee like me, I hope you’re availing yourself to TurboScan or something like it. It takes all the fuss out of paying for copies and scanning papers in yourself. You can almost – and I said almost – become a paperless genealogist. (An oxymoron if I ever heard one.)
Happy detecting!
Genealogy Technology 
What a great idea. I’ve also used Genius Scan (another iPhone app) but haven’t really used it as much as I’d like. I’ll have to give TurboScan a try.
By the way, I think the shoes are a nice touch!
Welcome to Geneabloggers!
Thanks for the warm welcome, Linda! I laughed out loud (at myself – which is the only thing I can do) when I opened up the document and saw my shoes. Oh dear.
I really love TurboScan. I was worried at first about quality but they turn out awesome. It’s really just point and click. Let me know how it works out for you! 🙂
I haven’t tried TurboScan either; but will do so when I get a chance. – Revis
Let me know if it helps you! It can be a tad bit slow, but no slower than a copy machine. I think you just notice it a little more because you have to hold the phone perfectly still while you are scanning.