Pictorial History of Lee County Schools

In 2006 I published a book about the schools in Lee County Illinois. This boo/project was a combination of my love for history, family genealogy, a project toward my masters degree, and sort of work related. Website of book publisher.

This write-up is intended to describe my experience putting together the book, Pictorial History of Lee County Schools. I say the term, “Put Together,” rather than write because it just as much work scanning, laying out, and formatting the book as it was writing the brief histories of many of the schools.

Probably as far back as the mid to late 1990’s I started to gather photo’s of some of the old one room school houses the were in Lee County IL. Part of my interest at that time had to do with the Sugar Grove Church and School which is next to the cemetery that many of my ancestors are buried. Over the next several years I accumulated more and more. In 2004 when I started working at the Lee/Ogle Regional Office of Education I discovered many more photo’s in their archives. I scanned these photos over time. During the same time I found more at the Lee County Genealogical Society, The Loveland Museum in Dixon IL and other places. I had over two hundred of these old photos and put them into a large 2 foot by 4 foot poster that I hung in the Lee/Ogle Regional Office of Education. The poster created a lot of comments and interest and led to even more photos being discovered.

In 2006 the idea of making a bigger poster was considered but the pictures on the poster were only about two inches square each. I thought the ideal thing would be to put them into a book format. This would be a time consuming task and due to the fact that I was working full-time and taking classes part-time at Western Illinois University I didn’t think I would ever get to this for a few more years. During one of the classes I had at Western Illinois University, the idea came to mind of doing the book at an Independent Class. I contacted my adviser/instructor at WIU in an email to discuss the possibility and she explained the process in an email. I knew that in order to actually put a book together would relate to several of the goals and objectives of someone working in Instructional Technology.

Although I consider myself to be pretty fluent in Microsoft Word I knew that it takes more than just sitting down and typing in order to put a book together. Some of the things I wanted to accomplish were to have the book focus on the pictures. I looked at several books and found that I liked the 6 x 9 format for size. I knew that there were at least 170 school districts in early Lee County so I figured a book at least that many pages would be necessary and I could dedicate one page for each school. Once I had this figured out I wanted to see how much a book this size would cost. I started searching the Internet. I had heard of Lulu.com and checked out their website. Lulu.com lets people publish their own books. Once a book is published they are ordered and printed on demand. The estimated cost to have my book printed would be about 8 dollars each.

After deciding that I would use Lulu.com to publish my book I found that they had a template already formatted for the size book that I wanted. I downloaded the template from their website and decided to use this. It had the margins, gutter, and page numbers already formatted.

The website also gave me detailed instructions on how to design the cover of the book. I found an old picture history book on an area of Pennsylvania that I liked. It was a sepia cover of two ladies from the 1930’s. I looked at the pictures that I had and found several that I liked but not any certain one that stood out. The idea came to mind to take my own picture and add a sepia tint to it. I mentioned the Sugar Grove Church and School earlier and decided to take a photo of it to use. There are a few modern features to the front such as a concrete ramp to make it handicap accessible but other than that I looks as what it did nearly 100 years ago. Jodie, my wife, and I studied how the children were dressed from many of the photos we had about 1900 and dressed our 7 year old daughter, Rachel, to look like 1900. She posed in front of the school and I took photos and am using one for the cover of the book. The idea is to make it look like an original old picture plus giving something for our daughter to be part of. I used the free program Infranview to size the cover to the exact pixel size and add the sepia tint to the photo.

The following are some lessons learned that I can use if I ever decide to put another book together.

• The writing and formatting process is far more time consuming then I ever thought. Scanning the pictures and naming them in a logical sequence took time. Importing them into the document and making sure they were in the correct place took several hours.
• Documenting sources were hard for some of the school histories because they are from notes and articles that were unidentified.
• Figuring out how to have a book published was easier then what I imagined. I thought there would be a required up front fee but with Lulu.com there is none.
• Getting an ISBN number for a book is also not as complicated as it may seem. The cost of one will end up costing about $150.
• A lot of people seem excited and offered to supply me with pictures but took a lot of prodding and coaxing to actually get the information from them.
• Having a deadline was both good and bad. The deadline forced me to get the project done but also caused me to abandon some leads for additional photos that I may have missed.
• This project was nearly too large for one person. There were times that I wished I had four or five people who I could have assigned tasks to do.
• Lee County is about county about forty miles long by about twenty-five miles high. I traveled to every inch of the county to find pictures and tidbits on the histories of the schools.
• Old people are lonely like to visit. As people contacted me about photos and histories many were just happy to find someone to visit with. They are full of interesting stories that they love to share.

The one question that I asked myself about this project is how is this going to help me with my career and education?

I look at this as a large project that took someone who is self motivated, able to schedule time, and meet deadlines. The case studies that I read in IDT 510 had many projects that required meeting deadlines and I think that is an important lesson that I learned with this project.