Oh golly, I thought, as brittle black and white photographs fluttered loose from their scrapbook pages and littered the floor. Merely trying to remove the decaying albums from their shelves had resulted in a shower of photographic material, and I hastily restored the escapees to their rightful pages. And there’s a whole closet full of these!
Daunting at first, perhaps, but as with any project a careful survey and methodical inventory soon made it clear that I could put things to rights. The problem: a collection of photograph albums compiled in the mid-20th century and containing images from as early as the late 1800s, documenting the lives of a family from Union City, Erie County. The photographs themselves were generally in stable condition, but the tape (horror!) fixing them to the old, acidic black album pages was deteriorating, as were the pages and bindings of the albums. Most concerning of all was the fact that these images were quickly being silenced by the passage of time—as the older generation of the family passed away, soon no one would know the names of these mustachioed men on porch steps or women wearing their elaborate gowns and hair ribbons.
Loose photographic collections can usually be rehoused in archival-quality photo sleeves and boxes, labelled to identify the individuals represented, and perhaps scanned to preserve a digital copy. An album presents a different challenge. Its images are laid out in a particular way by the original creator, giving insight into the relationship between people and their photographic representations as they flow across the pages. My job is to maintain that original order while protecting and cataloging the individual images.
First, the images were carefully removed from the original pages, along with any adhesive when possible. They were then transferred, in their original order, to new pages that meet archival standards. Information from the photo backs or from interviews with living family members was used to caption the images on their new page. Eventually, the neat, annotated pages will live in an archival box for safer storage and viewing. As with any cataloging project, my goal is to see these amazing photographs cared for to a high standard and made useful to the many generations to come. Rather than leave monster projects lurking in closets, let’s haul out these collections and let them shine.
The Free-Range Historian 