Aaron Disbrow and Dr. Mark Grover, University Libraries

There is an immense amount of church history throughout the world that is unknown to many of us. It was our intent and purpose in this project to aid the dispersion of this history throughout the church. Through Professor Mark Grover we were introduced to Nestor Curbelo, the church historian for the South America South Area. Brother Curbelo is the author of several books and is working on others that chronicle the history of the Mormons in the distinct countries of South America. These books provide volumes of information, but Brother Curbelo also has a great love of photography, which has produced thousands and thousands of historical pictures. My wife who is a photographer and has extensive experience working in photo studios and developing labs helped greatly with the project.

Before departing for Argentina we purchased a Nikon Coolscan III digital negative scanner. Brother Curbelo works for the church institute program in Buenos Aires and has an office in the church office building in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. We set up the project in his office. Unfortunately, it took us several weeks to get the project up and running. Brother Gustavo Mernies, one of IT specialist at the church office, helped greatly with the set up. There were incompatibility issues with the software from the scanner and the computers at the offices. Brother Mernies was finally able to get the scanner to connect to the computer by loading it with Windows 95.

After the initial bumps in the road the project went very well. We estimated that Brother Curbelo has well in excess of 100,000 negatives from approximately 30 years of documenting church history. His photos include history from years well before his own time as he has made specific visits to important people that contributed to building the church in Argentina and its neighboring countries. Decades of information are contained in the Brother Curbelo’s pictures, but needs to be documented with the help of Brother Curbelo in order to identify the people and places contained therein.

The project consisted of three major components: organizing, scanning and documenting the negatives. Brother Curbelo has meticulously preserved and stored his negatives throughout the years. In the time that we had to work, once the set up was finished, we were able to scan upwards of 3,000 pictures. As we scanned the pictures Brother Curbelo would add notes describing them. He was not able to keep up with the documentation because of the duties he had to fulfill with his job and with his students, but it is very important that this project be completed with his help since he is the only one that knows who the people are and where and when they were taken.

By starting this project we hope that Church histories throughout the world will be digitized. Now that it has been started in Argentina we could have access to thousands of pictures that have been digitized. If more students can contribute to the project and help Brother Curbelo document the histories he has compiled then one day all of his pictures might be available on the Internet to anyone in the world. This can help us understand the how the church has grown and risen from obscurity throughout the world. For example, we scanned pictures of original meetinghouses of towns throughout Argentina (in most cases they were small rooms or homes rented by the church), pictures of the founding members of those towns, pictures of church activities, and pictures of important church activities. Brother Curbelo traveled to Chile while we were there in order to photograph and document some of the happenings at the rededication of the Santiago temple.

The amount of negatives and stories continues to grow along with the church and as more and more people have access to cameras. We absolutely loved our time in Argentina and found it incredibly interesting to learn a little bit about the history of the church in South America as we worked. There is still an incredible amount of work to be done and it is our hope that the project will be continued for many years to come.