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Click here to sign up for Meridian's FREE email updates Care and Repair of Family Photographs
By Janet Hovorka
The visual history of your ancestors is in my opinion the most important part of your family history because it is the part that breathes life into the stories and vital statistics. While searching for your family's history, you may have come across many pictures or a few, but no matter what you have accumulated, you definetly want to make sure it lasts for the generations to come.
All of the products listed in this article are available at University Products (www.universityproducts.com), Hollinger Corp (www.hollingercorp.com) or Gaylord Library Supply Company (www.gaylord.com). You might call and ask for a catalog from any of these companies. Their catalogs are very informative about the latest archival techniques. If you need the help of a professional archivist for an especially damaged photo, check the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works Inc (www.aic.standford.edu).
Before You Start
The first thing you want to do whenever you are dealing with photographs is wash your hands and get some white cotton gloves.
By far the most damaging thing you can do to your photos is love them to death. Besides fingerprints, the oils on your fingers can do lots of damage even when you are careful. A soft brush is also helpful to remove dust and loose dirt if the collection has been sitting for a while.
If you are lucky enough to find a collection of pictures, be sure as you are initially going through them to preserve the order of the collection. Clues about unlabeled pictures—such as where the pictures came from and in what order they were accumulated--may be in the other items around them. An easy way to preserve the order is to take several digital photographs as you initially unpack the collection. That way you will have a digital record to go back to when you need clues about the subject matter of the pictures.
When you are going to work on a collection of pictures, it is best to set up a work space where you can leave things out until your project is completed. Initially you will want to go through the collection to get an idea who and what time periods are covered in the pictures. You can temporarily slide pictures into polypropylene sleeves to reduce the handling while you organize and identify everything. Separate out the items that need to be taken to relatives for identification and anything that may need to be taken to a professional archivist. Then you can start labeling, boxing and indexing each piece. From the very beginning, make sure that any treatment you do is completely reversible.
Restoration You Can Attempt
There are some things you can do at home to preserve and protect your visual history. But mostly the rule is don't do much. Many well-meaning people have done irreversible damage to their pictures when they would have survived beautifully if just left alone. To understand what you can do to take care of your pictures, let me explain a little about the history of photography.
An important part of understanding archival techniques for photos is to understand how they are made. All photos consist of 1) an emulsion layer, 2) a base, and 3) an adhesive. The emulsion layer is the chemicals that make the lights and darks show up in the picture. The base is whatever holds the emulsion together. And the adhesive is another chemical compound that lies in between the emulsion and the base holding the emulsion to the base.
If you are really lucky you might have a daguerreotype, ambrotype or tintype. A Daguerrotype (1839-1850 or so) is mirror like. It is a copper base with a silver coating and is usually found in a case. The daguerreotype is the first commercially successful type of photography. An ambrotype (1854-1870s or so) has a glass base with black behind it. They are also usually found in some sort of case. Tintypes (1856-1890s or so) are on a thin sheet of metal, usually tin, and are often found in jewelry type cases. With all three of these early photograph types, don't take them out of the cases or attempt to repair an original. The emulsion and adhesive are usually extremely sensitive and can turn to dust at a touch. If repair is desired, definitely take any of these types of photographs to a professional.
Card Photographs or Cartes de Visite were very popular from the 1850s to the end of the 1800s and were produced even until the 1950s. These are created on a paper base and mounted to hard cards so that the base wouldn't curl. They were used in the 19 th century as visiting cards—kind of like today's business cards—people collected Cartes de Visite of their friends and visitors and displayed scrapbooks of them in their parlors. They were also made into postcards and stereographs. You don't want to remove these from the cards, even if the card is acidic because removal will usually damage the photograph. You can brush off any dust or dirt with a soft brush. And the strongest restoration I would recommend would be to use a little Filmoplast to mend the back of the card. Filmoplast is a very thin tape with a light adhesive that is removable. Never use anything like Filmoplast on the front of the print or it will lift the emulsion layer.
As we come forward to the present we come to Resin coated papers (1960-present). Unfortunately, the closer we get to today, the less archival the materials were that were used to create photos. Resin coated papers are going to discolor from the gasses that the paper gives off and they easily crack when subjected to temperature fluctuations. In some of them, the emulsion from one color or another will deteriorate faster than the other parts of the emulsion causing them to go yellow or red. With these photos, you want to protect the negatives so that you can reprint pictures—sometimes the negatives will last better than the photographs. Only recently has preservation become an issue. When developing pictures now, be sure to ask for fiber based papers without resin coating. These pictures can also be supported on the back with a little piece of Filmoplast and can be brushed off with a soft brush.
If your family took lots of Polaroids (1947-present) the best I can suggest is to copy, copy, copy and get the images out of that format. Polaroids will fade in as little as 5-10 years and there are no negatives to make other copies. They will even fade when kept in a dry dark place. Cutting into a Polaroid will release the chemicals in the photo and make deterioration even quicker.
There are a few things you should do with any photographs you have. First, remove any staples, paperclips, rubberbands or string that can create creases or rust lines. Then you also want to take any uneven pressure off each picture so that there aren't any pressure points creating creases or folds. Never apply tape to the emulsion side of a picture or regular tape to any part of a picture, and never apply tape to negatives or transparencies. And of course never fold or roll any important pictures.
How to Store Your Most Common/Your Most Precious Photos
When storing your photographs you will want to decide which photographs are the most important to you and store them differently than the rest of your collection. You will want to spend a little money to make sure that your great-grandmother's wedding picture is well taken care of, but the 34 th picture of you and your dog may not be important enough to warrant such expensive treatment. With all pictures you want to protect them from temperature fluctuation, humidity, light, handling, insects, dust and gasses from other acidic storage materials. The best way to keep them from most of these problems is to keep them in the living area of your house. The temperature that is most comfortable for you is also the best for your images.
With the most important photographs, you first want to digitally copy the image so that you can archive the original. You can scan or take a high quality digital camera picture of the image to create an electronic copy, but keep the copying to a minimum because of the light danger involved. Believe it or not, making a good old-fashioned negative of the picture can still capture more details than the best digital scans. A 2 inch or larger negative can still be blown up very large in the future with great quality. If you have a good copy in another place, then you can put the original away in a safe place where it will be protected from too much handling. Again, loving a pictures is usually the most damaging thing that will happen to it.
Once it is copied, take your most important photographs and lay them flat interleaved with unbuffered tissue paper in short archival photo boxes the size of the picture. Keep like sized photos in the same box and have several different sized boxes for each size of picture so that a smaller photo doesn't leave uneven pressure marks on a larger photo that it is stacked with. Label the outside of the boxes to keep handling to a minimum when you are looking for a certain picture. And keep daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes in their own separate boxes. Archival four flap envelopes are also good for protecting each photo from the others around them and give you lots of space to label on the envelope while protecting the picture from uneven pressure.
With less important photographs, you can mount them to acid free, lignin free paper with photo corners and store in albums in polypropylene or polyester (mylar) sleeves. University Products offers binders that close completely like a box, thus protecting further from light and dust. If you do keep your pictures in regular binders, a table runner placed across the top of the shelf can protect light and dust from permeating the tops of the pages. And be sure to alleviate as much uneven pressure as you can by avoiding the buttons, and 3-d doodads popular in scrapbooking. You will end up with a nice button indentation on the picture on the opposite page. Use cute decorations like that in fun scrapbook projects with your extra copies.
If you have an antique scrapbook you want to preserve it is sometimes hard to decide how to take care of it. A scrapbook can be an archival item in and of itself. A friend of mine inherited two scrapbooks from her great-grandfather. The first was a series of Carte de Visite tucked in to cuts made in black acidic paper—postcards that he had sent home from a trip to Europe at the turn of the century. The second was a scrapbook he had made for his oldest child as a gift for his first Christmas. The pictures in the first scrapbook were easily removed and had writing on the back that she wanted to be able to see, so she took that scrapbook apart. The second scrapbook was glued together and a sweet memoir of the grandfathers love for his new son with writing of the grandfather's. She decided to leave the second intact. You can interleave the pages of an intact scrapbook with tissue paper to help protect the pages from each other if the additional tissue paper doesn't stress the binding. And storing the scrapbook in an archival box will also help it last longer.
If you have scrapbooks that you want to take apart, sometimes getting the pictures out can be a challenge. The electrostatic scrapbooks with stripes of glue that were popular in the 60s and 70s can be especially challenging. My mother's life's pictures are in such scrapbooks. While we have been unsuccessful in getting my mother's pictures out, other people have had success with non-waxed dental floss, heating the glue with a blow dryer, and using an xacto knife. In my mother's situation, we have just had to copy, copy and get them out of that format as the glue is creating stripes in the actual pictures.
Another important part of archiving is to protect the negatives. When you have good negatives, you can actually send two copies of the picture into the future so that one is more likely to survive. Again you can store them in Polypropylene or Polyester sleeves, or if they are more important, in archival four flap envelopes in an archival box. Several years ago when my washing machine flooded our house, water rained down on the bottom floor right on top of my family history negatives. When I opened the soaked archival box, I was thrilled to find the negatives and four flap enclosures completely dry. Needless to say, I was more than happy to spend $30 on another box.
Sometimes you might consider donating your collection to an archive. Archives usually can provide a safer home. An archivist usually wants to see a collection before it is organized but you can usually help identify items as they are archived. Most archives will want you to transfer ownership and copyright privileges before they will invest the money and labor in archiving your collection. If you do decide to donate your collection, make sure the contract states what you want them to do with any discards and be sure to get an appraisal for tax deduction purposes. And if possible, accompany your donation with a monetary donation to take care of the collection. Whether you donate the originals to an archive or not, be sure to share electronic and paper copies with websites and your family so that there are many copies to survive into the future.
Digital Restoration and Archiving
When it comes to digital restoration and archiving, the most important thing to remember is that digitizing is not archiving. Digital copies are good to have for repairing the image, sharing and copying, but your paper copies are much more likely to survive longer into the future. Paper, though fragile will usually last 100 years or more, microfilm lasts about 130 years, CDs will usually not last longer than 20 years depending on quality, audio and video tapes will last about 10-20 years and floppy disks will only last about 3 years. And in 20 years you may or may not be able to find a computer that will be able to read the data. So with all digital files, you need to have a migration plan—that you will re-copy all your genealogy files every year or two to the new computer, to make new copies or to the new medium that is becoming popular.
When you digitize your pictures, be careful of the type of file and resolution of the image. Tiff files are the biggest and contain the most information for the highest quality reproductions. Jpegs are smaller and do well for inserting into documents or sending over the web. Both can be saved in higher or lower dpi (dots per inch). Computer screens are usually 72 dpi, regular home inkjet printers usually print at 300 dpi and professional printers print at 600-1200 dpi. Doubling the dpi of a picture quadruples the size of a file. With each amount you want to enlarge a picture you will need more dpi and you never know what you might want to do with an image in the future. So, with the most important pictures, you will want to save a copy of the picture in a large high dpi tiff, and another in a small lower dpi jpg. That way you'll be ready for several kinds of uses.
For scanning, the obvious first step is to make sure the scanner glass is clean. Then you just have to play with your type of pictures. Sometimes color scans best preserve the tone of black and white photos, and sometimes grayscale scans can best preserve fading color prints. Grayscale files are usually much smaller. Be sure to save in several different formats. Photos can be restored and edited using numerous photo editing tools. Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard and can do amazing effects. Photofiltre is a free program (www. Photofiltre.com) that can do many editing tricks as well. Photo restoration is really an art that takes a lot of time and patience. You can play with contrast and brightness, hue and saturation to make faded images reappear, and the clone and healing tools are useful for repairing flaws. Be sure to save each edit as a new copy and keep the original scan separate.
Then when you are ready to make copies, if you print with the wrong ink and paper, your new copy may go bad faster than the original. Look for printers that use pigment ink, DuraBrite inks and Ultrachrome inks and papers, or Crystal Archive papers. In this area, you usually get what you pay for. Inexpensive inks and printers are usually not archival. At Generation Maps, we have found good success in printing antique photos on canvas giclees. The texture of the canvas covers the flaws of blowing up a small picture or a copy of a copy because your eye doesn't expect the print to be as crisp. And the ink sinks into the canvas producing a more archival print. We have tested giclees in the washing machine and outside during the temperature fluctuations, light, and snow of winter and have seen no noticeable difference.
When you have archived your pictures, be sure to remember that just because a picture is put away to protect against light and dust, you still want to keep copies out where you can enjoy them. Displaying your family history in your home can inspire you and create a wonderful atmosphere in your home. I even think the images of your ancestors will inspire you and help you come up with other research ideas that will make you a better genealogist. Above all, make sure you enjoy your heritage.
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