Saving A Crumbling Past—CoronaLife Day 614

This week I finally finished up watching sessions of the conference that was held the last week in October. Because it was virtual, all sessions were recorded and we had access to them for 60 days.

So in my new free time, I turned my attention to scanning the two family albums I finally got from my mom. As hoped, they did clear up the mystery of Caroline vs. Annie, and they had several pictures of relatives I did not yet have. Jackpot!

One of the albums is the kind where the photos are glued onto black paper. There were few photos in there of interest to me, but I noted that the album was in bad shape.

Although only from 1952, the binding had broken, some of the pages were loose, a number of the photos had come unstuck, and many of the black pages were crumbling to the touch.

So I decided to scan the entire book.

My aunt had written on many of the pages, some with identifying information, but also some notes showing her sense of humor. While the photos could easily have been saved and placed in another album, the living context of them as a collection would be lost with the destruction of those pages.

So I scanned the whole book today. The pages are too large for my scanner, so I had to do them in 2 or 3 chunks, depending on the photo layout. I will need to stitch them together again.

Stitching them together will not be hard. The scanning is the tedious and time consuming part. But now the book is preserved, and now that it’s digitized each of her 6 children can have digital copies of it. Although since it consists mainly of 10,000 photos of my aunt’s first child, I’m not sure how the other 5 siblings will feel!

Next up is the other album, which has so many photos I want that I will no doubt end up scanning that whole album as well. I am trying to get everything scanned by Thanksgiving so I can return the albums to my cousins.

Next week is a hectic week for me, so if I do not manage to get on, Happy Thanksgiving!

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