If you have any old pictures of yesteryear life in DeKalb County, you’re urged to make them available for the compilation of a pictorial history book through Arcadia Publishing’s “Images of America” series.
Images of America: A History of American Life in Images and Texts is a unique new resource cultivated from Arcadia Publishing’s award-winning series of local history books. At completion, it will include historical images and texts, celebrating the places and faces that give DeKalb County its spirit and life. All of the images and texts will enable users to explore the depth of the history of the county, as well as its cultures, architectural features, and more.
Ria Baker and Judy Fuson are compiling photos for the book.
Baker said that’s where you can be of help. “We are working on a book about DeKalb History with the Arcadia Publishing Company. We are looking for pictures and information to put in the book. If anybody has any good history pictures we can scan we ask for your help. We’ll come to your home and scan the pictures or we can pick them up, scan them, and bring them back to you or we can meet you at the library in Alexandria or Smithville and scan them there. We need pictures with information to go along with them and everybody will be asked to sign a release stating that they don’t mind their pictures being put in the book.. The publishing company wants us to have it to them by September. Hopefully, they’ll have the book out by January, 2012.. The sooner we can get the pictures from you, that would be great. We don’t want somebody who has a great picture to miss having it in the book so if you have a photo you want to contribute we certainly want it and even if we can’t use it in the book we still want to put it on a cd and place it in the libraries for people to access it if they want to,” said Baker
Fuson adds “We’re just compiling pictures that will illustrate the history of our county. We’re looking for things of the past. Businesses from old times and the old country stores around the county as well as the towns of Liberty, Alexandria, Dowelltown, and Smithville. Not just businesses, but the early settlers, the religious life, schools, special events, entertainment, life from early times. We’d like to devote one chapter of this book to the people who lived where the lake is now. We hope to do another book later on that. Each image will have a caption telling who, what, where, and when. Everybody who contributes a picture will be acknowledged. On every picture it will tell who it came from. We have to scan these pictures a particular way. The publisher gave us guidelines to follow on how to scan the pictures. We would like to have original copies of the pictures to scan. We won’t keep the pictures and we won’t send them away. We can come to your home and scan them or you can bring them to us and have us scan them. We’ll also accept old post cards. Sometimes people have old post cards with pictures of local areas. We can do those too,” said Fuson
If you have pictures you’d like to contribute or have scanned for the book, call Ria Baker at 529-2840, Judy Fuson at 597-6397, or WJLE at 597-4265.