Ancestry.com is excited to provide FGS Conference attendees the opportunity to have their family photos and documents scanned at the conference, for free, on our professional scanning equipment. It's a unique opportunity to have your family history records digitized!

Conference attendees can sign up for 15-minute scanning sessions on Thursday, 19 August, through Saturday, 21 August, to be held during the exhibit hall hours. Scanning-session signs-ups will open each morning-sign up Thursday morning for a Thursday time slot, Friday morning for a Friday time slot. Details on the scanning room location to come soon.

Will you be bringing items to scan? Please help us plan accordingly by letting us know how much and what you'll be bringing.

Document Types Accepted

• We can scan any document type, but the maximum size supported is 22" by 15". Any type of photograph, including tintypes, is accepted. Unfortunately we can not scan slides.
• More recent photographs or stable documents can be scanned at a much quicker rate on our high-speed scanner - meaning that you can have more documents scanned during your scanning session. Fragile or historical documents, photographs, bound books or albums and similar will be photographed.
• Copyright and re-publishing rights for the material are strictly the responsibility of patrons, but we reserve the right to reject any document for any reason.
• There is always a possibility that damage to older, more fragile documents may occur during the scanning process. Ancestry.com urges patrons to use their best judgment when choosing documents to be scanned.

Document Preparation

• Before your scanning session, please remove all staples, pins, and fasteners as well as any tape or sticky material from your photos and documents. These items can harm the scanning equipment.
• Please sort all of your documents and pictures by size, largest to smallest, before entering your session. This will enable our scanners to more effectively finish your documents in the time allotted.
• Photos mounted in an album will be digitized as a single image. Bound books do not need to be unassembled, but can be quite slow to digitize. Material stored in sleeves should be removed prior to the scanning session; materials remaining in sleeves will be digitized with the sleeves in place.

Scheduling

• You will be able to sign up for a 15-minute time slot, on a first come, first served basis. This time slot will include any document preparation not completed prior to the scanning session, so proper document preparation is crucial (see above).
• Generally we can scan about 50 documents per person in a 15-minute slot, more if documents and photos are newer and/or not fragile.
• Due to demand, we can accommodate only one scanning session per person during the conference.
• The scanned files will be saved to a thumb drive (provided by Ancestry.com) and given to attendees for their own use.