Preservation

 

Many years ago when my great uncle died, my uncle inherited the photo album of my great grandfather of his time over in Europe during World War I. Evidently my great grandfather took a camera with him overseas and then took the time to organize those photos in an album and label most of them when he got back home. I view it as a valuable treasure and I'm sure it is probably considered to be a treasure by others as I can't believe many of these probably still exist.

Back when my uncle inherited it, he let me borrow it and at the time, I painstakingly scanned all the pictures. I still have those pictures and occasionally look through them but it just was never the same as looking through the album. The album provides context and on many pages, handwritten notes in my great grandfather's writing. My digitized collection is just photographs with some information added to their file names to mimic the writing.

As we were sorting through my recently departed grandmother's things, I think my uncle must have realized how important family history is to me and disappeared into his bedroom and returned with my great grandfather's war album. I was shocked when he gave it to me and said I should keep it. I didn't argue with him.

But in the years since I copied those pictures, the album is getting to be in really rough shape and it falling apart. It needs to be preserved and it needs to be done immediately or there will be nothing left. I ordered some archival sleeves that contain no acid or PVC in them and a binder to contain them for now. I think as I go through and put the pages in those sleeves, I'll also try to do full page high resolution scans and perhaps try to recreate the book through an online service so that one can look through it instead of the very fragile actual album. (Just opening it for these two pictures caused a half dozen small pieces to break off of it!)

I'm not sure what other steps I should take. These albums aren't acid free nor was the paste they used to glue in the pictures. Despite that, the pictures are still in fairly decent shape. But I suspect nothing I do will be able to preserve it forever other than scanning and recreating so that will be my main focus for now. 

Below is one of my favorite pictures from the album that I scanned all those years ago. It shows my great grandfather on the left presumably on one of the deserted parts of the battlefield.