This site is maintained by Charles and Tom Harness.

We've performed a general division of labor for this site. Charles is our historian and file keeper. Tom maintains the site, and adds new information or makes corrections. Just send us an e-mail and one of us will respond. If you want to send us a picture or have some other information, just include or attach that in the e-mail. We can't guarantee we'll put it on the site the very next day, but we'll not delay it too long. If you have questions about sending us anything, please ask and we'll try to help out. You can zip or compress the files prior to sending them to us if you know how to do that. Here are a couple of guidelines:

There shouldn't be any problems, but we should tell you that we are responsible for the content on this site and ultimately have the power of veto for material we don't think appropriate for whatever reason.

We would like to hear from you even if you just want to say hello and comment about the site.

Contact the Harness Family Website

Sending Photos

We would be glad to accept any photos related to Harness family history. We don't have the disk capacity nor the interest in setting up a contemporary photo album. The emphasis is on history and we would like to keep it that way. If you want to create an online family photo album, or if you already have one, we'll be glad to place a link to it on this website so everyone will know where it is. If you want to start such a site, you might want to look at myfamily.com. They offer free website services if you don't mind putting up with advertising banners, login passwords, and occassional unsolicited e-mail.

If you have a scanner, simply scan the pictures you want to send us and attach them to your e-mail. If you don't have a scanner, you can contact us about sending us the original prints so we can scan them and return to you afterwards. Most everyone knows someone who has a computer and a scanner. That's probably the best way to go.

Computer screens display pictures at 72 pixels (or dots) per inch. If you scanned a 3 x 5 photo at 100 dots per inch, you would end up with a photo that measured 300 x 500 pixels. That's a little smaller than the photo of four of the children of Roscoe and Nelle Harness that is on photo page number one. The large picture (not the thumbnail) measures 714 by 437 pixels.

We don't care how large the picture is that you send us unless it is extremely large. In fact, when we scan a photo we frequently scan it at 300 dots per inch or higher for editing and retouching. Once we have the picture cleaned up as much as possible, we save the large photo for reference and create a smaller one for the website. A 'thumbnail' photo is also created. We attempt to keep the photos high quality while making them as small in file size (bytes) as possible. That means the web page loads faster. Our goal is to have our pages load within 15 - 20 seconds maximum even on slow 28.8 modem connections.

We would actually prefer larger photo scans of photos especially if they require retouching. You can't do much with a tiny picture. We'll try to dress up old photo submissions but remember that takes time. Compressing large bmp or tif files will make them a fraction of the size of the originals, which makes them much quicker to e-mail.

Sending Text Files

If you have any kind of text files or history, we would prefer you send us a simple text (txt) file. However, we can read most documents created in word processors such as Microsoft Word. It will be necessary to re-format the information for a web page so we probably won't be able to preserve any fancy formatting. Simple text usually works best.

Sending Family History Files

The 'standard' for family tree history files is the GED file. If you are tracking history on a computer family genealogy program, you should have the ability to export your information as this type of file. Any notes, stories, or history in any other format is normally sent as a text file.