Jorgen and His Times

A year or two ago, while I was at my parents' house, my dad walked into the room carrying a stack of papers clipped together. He told me it was a story his grandma had written about her father immigrating to Canada from Denmark. I didn't know this existed until that moment. He mentioned that he had read it once a long time ago and that he should probably read it again. He also told me this was the only copy of the book that he knew about. Shortly after that conversation, I had a little idea: I wanted to turn it into a real book for him. Fast forward about a year, and Christmas 2025 was approaching. I decided I would finally put the book together as a Christmas gift.

The first step was making a plan.

I needed to find the stack of papers and get them scanned. Since they had been written on a typewriter, I would have to properly reformat everything to create a digital version of the book. Then I'd need to figure out where I could have it printed and bound into an actual book. By this point, I wasn't living with my parents anymore, so I asked my mom to find the stack of papers for me. Luckily, she works at a school and was able to scan them into a digital PDF without much trouble. It just took some time to work through all 100-plus pages.

Once she emailed me the PDF, I ran into my first major challenge.

The pages had been typed on a typewriter, and there was quite a bit of dirt and wear from when they had originally been photocopied. When I ran the document through an OCR tool (which basically converts a scanned PDF into editable text), it introduced a ton of errors. There were missing characters, extra characters, punctuation mistakes, and countless little formatting issues. This became the most time-intensive part of the project. I read through the entire book line by line, correcting every error I found. There wasn't really any shortcut. It was a completely manual process. It took me a good two or three weeks to finish, but once I was done, I finally had a clean digital copy of the manuscript. There were also a few handwritten notes my grandma had left for my Dad, my uncle and a few other family members, so I was sure to include those too.

Next, I needed to figure out how to get it printed.

There was a custom bookbinder fairly close to my parents' house, so I stopped in after visiting them one day to ask about pricing. After going back and forth on a few options, the total cost for printing the pages and professionally binding a single copy came to around $250. As much as I would have loved to have the book custom-bound in beautiful leather by a local business, it was a lot more expensive than I had expected. I also hoped to make more than one copy, so I started looking into other options. Eventually, I came across an online printing service called Lulu. They specialized in custom book printing, and honestly, the process was incredibly straightforward. All I needed to provide was a cover. I have a bit of a background in graphic design, so I designed a simple cover for the book, putting my personal creative touch on the family heirloom. Then, I just had to upload the PDF, pay the printing fees, and place the order. By this point, I was cutting it a little close to Christmas, but thankfully, the books arrived just in time. They were also affordable enough that I was able to order a second copy for my uncle, since we were all getting together for Christmas dinner with his family.

At that Christmas dinner, I gave both my dad and my uncle a copy of Jorgen and His Times.

They absolutely loved it. In fact, they appreciated it so much that we ended up ordering another nine copies to share with the rest of the family. It was an incredibly rewarding experience to put the time and effort into creating something so meaningful for our family, something that could continue to be reprinted and shared as our family grows. Reading the story was equally meaningful. It gave me a much deeper appreciation for the hardships my great-great-grandfather and his family had endured when they immigrated to Canada and the difficult lives they lived. It's by no means a particularly happy story, but it is an inspiring one. Learning about my family's history has been an incredibly humbling experience. I've included a link to the PDF version of Jorgen and His Times if you'd like to read it for yourself.