Mike Bedford’s
PRESERVING YOUR PAST
Guide for family historians
FAMILY ARCHIVES
Recently we investigated how to preserve your valuable and irreplaceable family records such as photographs, letters, books, cine films and tape recordings (‘Preserving your home archive’, February 2018 FT). We looked at how to protect The physical records Themselves and also how to preserve The information They contain by digitising Them. It’s likely, though, that despite your best attempts, many of your older family archives will have suffered over time before you inherited Them. Photographs, in particular, are liable to damage due to constant handling and also to environmental conditions such as sunlight and humidity. While photos in albums might have fared raTher better, those which had been stored loose in drawers or as stacks in old envelopes could well be torn, dogeared, creased, stained or faded.
Attempting to restore old photographs by ironing Them flat, repairing tears with adhesive tape or glue, or disguising creases with a fine paint brush and a very steady hand is not recommended. In all probability you’ll just make Them worse or, at The very least, you’ll jeopardise Their longterm survival. The best you can hope to achieve, Therefore, is to store Them in such a way that They won’t get any worse in The near to mid-term future. However, if you’ve digitised your photos, as discussed in our previous article, things are entirely different.