Shameless Picasa Plug & Preliminary Bibliography

After initially creating my Picasa account the few pictures I had in my files were uploaded automatically to Picasa.  I thought nothing of it and went about my business.  A week later while doing my Palouse research, I was visiting the archives and special collections at the WSU library and I found myself unable to use the scanner correctly and thought it would be easier to just use my cell phone to snap some photos of the 60+ documents I found in regards to my research for my final project.  When I got back to Spokane and tried to retrieve the pictures from my phone to print out I was having no luck at all, nothing but problems not matter what I tried.  I then decided to e-mail the pictures to my gmail account and when I opened gmail and downloaded my archive pictures I noticed that, without having selected or done anything first, Picasa was syncing with gmail with every file download and soon I had all my badly needed documents in Picasa, nice and instantly organized. 

Then I ran into yet another problem with my cell phone pictures - while taking the pics, I was partially blocking the light causing the documents to come out with some serious shadowing.  Although I can read them, I know that if these were ever to be uploaded to Omeka they would be damn near unreadable.  Again, Picasa comes in to save the day.  I noticed that there is an option which allows you to lighten (or darken) your photos.  With a simple slide of the icon, I made the final printed product even lighter and more readable than the original document was in the archives.  In short, Picasa has been a godsend for my research, for both accessibility and practicality.  I would suggest that everyone doing their projects this year utilize Picasa as much as possible, especially if you are planning on using your android device to take pictures of documents.  And its easy as heck to use.                                           

Preliminary bibliography for my Palouse stops.  The Whitman and Spokane County towns (and area historical events) that I am focusing on are:  Farmington, Spangle, Hangman Valley (Qualchan), Garfield, Pullman, Malden, Steptoe and Rosalia (both the battle and the town, of course).

Although I am still in the process of finding more sources and documents I do have some, especially certain towns.  So far I have focused on collecting documents for these places that include settler correspondence, incorporation records, train orders, social clubs/fraternal organization records and government records.  I have also been looking through many secondary sources such as local/regional histories and family histories.

Secondary Sources: Gateway to the Palouse,  Nona Hengen.  Plowed Under, Andrew Duffin.  The Pacific Northwest, Carlos Schwantes.  Warrior of the Mist, T.G. Boyden.  Renegade Tribe, Richard Scheuerman.  Palouse Country, Richard Scheuerman.  Finding Cheif Kamiakin, Michael O. Finley and Richard Scheuerman.

Primary Sources:  1888 train orders for Pullman, Sprague and Palouse City. Student correspondence from Washington State College. Document in reference to the first telephone line installed in the towns of Colfax and Almota.  Farmington, Past and Present, first person accounts of early pioneer day in Farmington. Accounts of first postal worker in Spangle and his frontier experiences. State incororation documents for Garfield, Pullman and Rosalia.