Mesa man digitizes historic Ariz. images

MESA, Ariz. — It is often said that a picture is worth 1,000 words. But Mesa resident James Tanner has thousands of images on glass negatives that are invaluable to the history of Arizona and the families who transformed it from a territory to a state a century ago.

They are from the photographic collection of his great-great grandfather, Charles Godfrey DeFriez Jarvis, and great grandmother, Margaret Jarvis Overson, who took the bulk of the pictures as professional photographers in St. Johns and Apache County during the late 1800s to the early part of the 20th century.

The collection includes portraits of pioneer families in front of their homes, worshippers in front of churches and classes of children in front of schools — people Tanner also is working to identify through others who will eventually see the digitized images on the Internet.

For now, many of the images are stored in cardboard boxes and plastic tubs on his family room floor.

But as the Grand Canyon state has been preparing to kick off its centennial celebration — Arizona became a state on Feb. 14, 1912 — Tanner has been digitizing the collection of images which he acquired from a cousin in Phoenix last month. He hopes to complete the project sometime this year, after he finishes digitizing about 10,000 burial permits from the Mesa City Cemetery from 1919 to the early 1960s for the Family History Research Center in Mesa.

During the course of his family research, Tanner and his daughter, Amy Tanner Thiriot, put out an S.O.S. on their family blog on theancestorfiles.blogspot.com, asking what happened to the Jarvis photo collection. Within two years, Tanner said he received an answer from a cousin in Phoenix who had them at his home since 1968, the year his great grandmother died.

"Many people don't think there's value in old pictures, documents and letters," said Tanner, a retiring lawyer. "Someone in the family passes away, and these things get dumped into the garage, and as time goes on, they often get thrown away. People sometimes have the attitude, 'Oh, these pictures aren't my family,' and they don't appreciate the genealogical and historical value of them. Yet they are of someone's family and valuable to others. When we heard back from my cousin who had the collection, we were like, 'Wow, this is great.'"