Post date: 14-Jan-2014 10:01:12
After the Christmas holiday, I started the potentially long process of gathering historical photos and other documents for building the Google Lit Trip to go along with "Things That Must Not Be Forgotten". I began with contacting my oldest brother Russ, to see if he has copies of any old photos of my father from the period of the book, especially those that were used on the cover. He got right back to me with digital copies of whatever he had on hand. However, there are a number of bins of old photos in storage at his house in Vancouver which need to be sorted and digitised - this huge job will have to wait until the summer holiday when I am back in Vancouver before I can find more images to use.
I also combed through my own photos of Beijing, Qingdao and Beidahe from when I lived there, as I have a few photos of places from the book, such as St. Michael's Cathedral in Qingdao. I also started building a Google Earth map with placemarkers showing the known locations of some of the sites from the book, and the estimated or best-guess locations for places such as the old Beijing house which no longer exist today. This has been a time-consuming and challenging process, as China has not only changed drastically since the days of the book, but there is no Street View information in Maps or Earth to go by either - as I have always said in these situations . . . "TIC - This Is China".