Persevering at Preservation

 

Clara Kuck's Photo Album

My first order of business upon receiving the albums belonging to Clara Elizabeth Kuck was to preserve them. I started with the photo album by carefully taking apart the album which was fairly easy since it was one of those expandable ones of the era but did require some gentleness since it is over 100 years old. Once apart, I did a high resolution scan of all 75 pages front and back along with the covers front and back. I did this once before with my great grandfather's World War I photo album which was in much worse shape and eventually put all the scans into an online book using Shutterfly that allowed me to see the exact layout and all the pictures as the original album but in new condition. I'm not sure I'll do that with this book but at least I have the option. I would have liked to be able to remove the photos from the album and do individual scans of some of them but time has welded them in place and the fragile pieces that hold the photos in place simply rip off, at least the one I tried. I would like to see if there is writing on the back as there was on the one I tested and some of the loose ones but I don't want to destroy the album in the process. For now though, I am not going to do so. 

I have then moved onto the post card album which has surprised me a bit. Not only are the postcard pictures themselves of a historic time in Germany's history, but many of the backs have messages written on them. Some from Clara herself explaining the contents of the picture or how her life meshes with it and some from others writing her. I have found some that have comments on the contents of the day be it a future emperor or one that mentions the disaster of the Titanic which had just sank. For sure, there is lots of material, perhaps years worth, for future blog posts. But as much as I want to stop after each photo or each post card and crank out a post with my musings, I am focusing on preservation of everything first. The post cards are a ton of work as there is probably 75 pages of them with three cards on each side of the page which makes 12 high resolution scans which probably means 30 minutes of work without much pause. I'm not sure how long that means it will take but I know it will take me days if not a week or so to get through them all.

Clara Kuck's Postcard Album