Now that you are ready to move your family treasures into archival storage, take time to review best practices for preserving the items in your archive. This section contains information on Organizing Options and Storage Solutions for specific heirloom items. You will also find specific Cautions and Tips for working with the materials. This chapter covers paper-based items; chapter seven discusses photographs and film, and chapter eight deals with artifacts and collectibles.
Resources in this chapter include archival suppliers and where to find more information about proper preservation of artifacts and memorabilia.
Receipts. Newspaper clippings. Old letters. Scrapbooks. Address books. All have one thing in common—all are made from paper, in its many colors, shapes, and sizes. And while nineteenth-century letters may have been scripted on fine rag paper, close contact with a scrap of yellowed newspaper can cause permanent stain and damage.
If your inherited archive is free from paper trash, consider yourself lucky. I have worked with dozens of family collections and over half held from moderate to extreme quantities of paper
trash. Why? Because paper is free or cheap, it comes to you, it has many worthwhile uses, and, for many people, it’s hard to resist.
All that paper can be too much for some people. Saving vital information is one thing, saving an entire lifetime of cancelled checks is quite another. As curators, we might have just a teeny-bit of hoarder in our own DNA. Be strong. You don’t want to end up on reality television with your closets and cabinets thrown open to the world. When it comes to paper, you can feel just fine about throwing away quite a bit.
There’s saving, and then, there’s saving. Whatever bits of paper you do decide to keep, it helps to know the full cost of your decision.
As you begin to sort and organize your archive, ask yourself: Is this item worth the time and the cost of archival supplies to be processed for your archive? Maybe the item is not vital, but nonetheless, is interesting. I suggest you consider a three-part evaluation of materials. Instead of saving everything, decide if something is:
1. Vital: The paper gives lineage information or other key information about the person, place, or event, or it confirms or refutes family tradition. Handle these items with care and conservation. Digitize the image, store the original, and index file names and descriptions.
2. Not vital, adds color: This paper adds color and interesting information about the person, place, or event. You have several options when deciding what to do with nonvital items. You can leave the items in the original box, or move all similar items to one community archival box. Maintain a General Index on the Inventory Sheet. Digitize as needed. If the information on the paper is more useful than the actual piece of paper, consider making a digital copy and discarding the paper. Or place the item in less optimal storage.
3. Not Archival: If a paper doesn’t add personal information, don’t bother saving it as part of your family archive. If the information is of interest to only you, keep it somewhere outside of the archive. For example, if you enjoy scrapbooking or crafting, move interesting bits of ephemera to your scrapbooking supplies. I have a small plastic shoebox filled with 1950s valentines, sweet bookmarks, and other bits of the past that I enjoy using in collage and handmade greeting cards.
Review all the items in your archive box by box, and consider giving your full attention and resources to only those items that really count. When you are tempted to save odd bits of cool ephemera, remember your original goal to preserve your family history. Take care of the vital stuff first.
Family letters are among the most valuable heirlooms in any archive. Correspondence can provide new information or verify family legends about births, deaths, and marriages. Historians love family letters for the rich details they reveal about relationships and everyday life. Reading old letters can become almost addicting; it’s hard to stop mid-story. All that handling can damage old paper. Envelopes become brittle, and folded stationery can crack and break along the crease.
Use the original order of groups and packets to help identify mystery letters. Whenever you encounter a group of letters bundled or tied together, make a note of all the letters in the group and indicate what held them together (e.g., tied together with blue ribbon or inside a larger envelope).
Working with letters is a time-consuming task. Break the task it into steps, if necessary. Proceed through each step as you have time.
It’s very important for letters to be stored flat in archival sleeves. Do this first and then, when you have time to add file names and read or transcribe the letters, they can be handled more easily and with less damage from folding and refolding.
Newsprint is so damaging to other items that many museums will no longer accept clippings or newspapers in an archival donation. Archivists also encourage digitizing and printing a copy on archival-quality paper, instead of saving the original. Watch for poor-quality paper and isolate it from other materials.
I have several original newspapers from the early twentieth century that feature dramatic news articles about my grandmother and her first husband. Although preserving the information in the articles is my first priority, I also want to preserve the newspaper itself.
Full-size newspapers are too large to be safely or accurately scanned on a standard 8.5” × 11” personal scanner, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a digital copy of them. Instead of scanning, use digital photography to capture the image. Lay your newspaper flat on the floor and stand above the paper to photograph it with a digital camera. Use natural light and turn off the flash. You should be able to snap a good quality image that will be readable on your computer screen.
After scanning clippings or photographing full sheets, I print copies on archival-grade paper and write the newspaper name, date, and page number on the copy. The photocopy is stored with other original documents because the actual newsprint would damage the other papers in the box. I place the original newspaper flat for storage in a large archival box with other newspapers and clippings.
Keep all original newspapers and clippings together and stored separately from other materials. Organize copies of clippings with other original documents to suit your objectives:
Marriage certificates, property deeds, school diplomas, and legal documents are often printed or handwritten on high-quality paper and survive for centuries in excellent condition. These may include vital documents, so do all you can to preserve them properly.
Other paper documents, such as receipts, lists, and notes don’t fare so well, mostly because they were printed or written on inexpensive, poor-quality paper. The information likely wasn’t meant to be kept for a long time.
Always isolate anything made of newsprint or cheap-grade paper. It’s not worth damaging your grandfather’s Last Will and Testament by stacking it with a crumbling cleaning receipt. Just because a loved one kept the paper, doesn’t mean you have to. Remember to identify papers as vital or nonvital, and keep nonvital items only if you feel they really contribute value to your archive.
Carefully remove any of the following you find attached to documents or lying loose in your family archive:
Old staples can present a particular challenge. Don’t use a modern staple remover; this may tear or crease the old document. Follow these steps instead.
Scrapbooks and handmade albums, by their very nature, are filled with a mix of materials—a carefully pressed flower, a crumbling receipt for a prom dress, baby’s wrist band from the hospital. These items may have 3-D surfaces that are attached to the page with glue, ribbon, or metal. They also may include botanical or once-living specimens. That’s what makes them so wonderful! Ephemeral best describes the contents of many scrapbooks and baby albums. They are filled with items that were never intended to last for posterity.
Consider creating a digital copy of the album to refer to in your family history research, allowing the original to be stored undisturbed. High-quality scanned images can also be used to create a reproduction edition that can be shared with family and friends as a printed book or in e-book format.
Your archive may be a sort of scrapbook in itself. I’ve seen archives that included recipe cards, old-fashioned postcards, valentines, vintage greeting cards, and knitting patterns. Most of these materials can be cared for in the same way as documents and papers.
Conservators recommend that bound books be stored upright on shelving; however, handwritten volumes, such as journals and diaries, and unique books, such as a family Bible, should be handled individually as bound manuscripts and stored in archival book boxes or four-flap enclosures.
Most family collections include a few books—high school and college yearbooks, favorite cookbooks, novels, or poetry volumes. Conservators recommend that stable bound books be stored upright on shelving unless they are rare or in poor condition.
For most of us, the best and easiest place to store family books is right in with our current volumes. Your bookcase is probably located in the temperate environment of your family room, living room, or den and relatively free from dust, insects, and extreme fluctuations in temperature or humidity.
Are you a second- or third-generation genealogist? Does research run in your genes? Does your family archive include boxes of genealogy research, printed pedigree charts, handwritten family group sheets, and carefully photocopied source material?
When my sister and I inherited our mom’s stuff, we had no idea that Mom was such a good record keeper. She must have heard the “Cite Your Sources” chorus because her files were filled with photocopied pages from books, Web printouts, and copied correspondence. It’s a genealogist’s dream to find source material right there with the research, but what do you do when the sheer volume of material threatens to take over your own home or your own research materials?
First, go back and look at your goals in accepting the responsibility of your family archive. Do you want to extend your pedigree? Or are you working on a family history book? Whatever your goal, you owe it to yourself to screen the new materials with an eye for moving forward. You do not have to be overwhelmed and burdened by someone else’s stuff.
Take a page from the archivists at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Archivist Judy Lucey works with donors to select materials for the society archives. She avoids adding photocopies of available journals and research materials. This is duplicated material you can find somewhere, so there’s no need to keep it. She also declines original newspapers because they contain acid that can damage other items they are stored with. Feel free to apply these two principles to your archive and get rid of material guilt-free. If you want to keep newspapers, follow the storage and preservation advice outlined earlier in this chapter.
In vetting Mom’s genealogy research, I moved her original notes to a new plastic file box, eliminating any duplicated material I found.
I saved
I didn’t save
I made digital copies and discarded the paper originals for: some research material from unknown sources; I didn’t want to lose the material, but it was more than one hundred pages, and I didn’t want to store it. My ScanSnap sheet-fed scanner made quick work of the pile.
National Archives <www.archives.gov/preservation/family-archives>
Northeast Document Conservation Center <www.nedcc.org/resources/resources.php>