1920s Summers By The Shore Thanks to Brookstone iConvert for iPad

(Last Updated On: April 17, 2012)

Note: I’m giving away an iConvert for iPad Scanner – read through to the end of this post to enter to win!

I’m incredibly fortunate to have a large collection of antique family photos. Some of my favorites are the ones of my grandmother and her sisters “Down the Shore” in New Jersey in the early 1920s.

My grandmother and her sisters were poor, and my aunt Helen (aka “Honey”) was ill quite often. The city was no place to be in the hot summertime and so they and many of their friends headed out to group homes at the beach for a bit of a getaway.

All of these pictures were taken in Long Branch from what I can tell. The girls appear to be friends from the Hebrew Free School, which was in Newark. I can identify my aunts, and a few other family members and friends, but have no idea who most of these girls are

Oh but what a time they had! They produced plays.

My aunt (wearing spectacle and holding the round suitcase) loved this sort of thing. She was famous for her costume-ry well into her old age. You could hand her three scraps of crepe paper, a ribbon and a paper plate and she’d hand you back a fascinator hat fit for royalty.

These summers clearly meant the world to my aunt and grandmother, who dropped out of school after 8th grade to work and help with family finances. At the shore, they were just young people, having a good time. They went to the beach.

They went for car rides and they crafted.

I’ll never know the full story behind all these old photos but I’m so glad I have what I have. I’m even more glad that I was able to quickly and easily scan, preserve and share over 200 of these photos with this Brookstone  iConvert scanner for iPad.

Brookstone recently sent one for me to try out and (understandably) I couldn’t wait to get these old pics out!

It was love at first scan.

This lightweight, small scanner is pretty much plug and play once you install the app on your iPad. Just dock your device and the scanner works beautifully and quickly, with images landing in your camera roll. I was able to send to iCloud, dropbox and email/instagram within seconds of each scan.

The scanner feeds docs of varying sizes through pretty reliably but I recommend using their scanning envelope (provided) for your delicate photos. I ended up using it for all of my photos, including the less fragile ones as I found things fed through and scanned a little better using this tool. It made the size of the item I was feeding a little more uniform which helped me get into a rhythm (scanning while watching tv). So I just used it for all my photos and docs and recommend doing this.

I had no issues with scan quality. In fact I was very impressed by how clear the photos scanned, even when enlarged.

It was particularly exciting for me to scan some old photos like this one – so tiny as to be almost un-viewable, and then look at the enlarged version on my ipad screen.

That’s my mom at about 12, by the way. Same age as my daughter and the resemblance… bam! This is another reason why I love old photos. I found one of my Grandmother’s brother from WW1 that was a ringer for my 20 something nephew as well.

I’m just in love with this tiny, portable, FAST scanner.  And guess what….

Brookstone has given me one iConvert for iPad scanner to give away to a reader.

Tell me what items you’d like to scan, if you had this scanner. I’ll pick one winner on Friday the 13th  of April at noon. It will be a good luck day for the winner!

Disclosure: Brookstone sent a scanner to me to facilitate this review. I am a member of their review crew.

UPDATE: Congrats to Sharlene! You’ve won a scanner.