I have been thinking a lot about this lately and yesterday I went into the craft room for the first time in three weeks!!!I am a worrier, you see. I have my precious photographs, some of them taken more than a hundred years ago and I want to ensure that my children and grandchildren know who the people are.
My granny kept her pictures in an old tin "ditty box" that my Grandfather used when he was in the navy in the war - we are talking World War One here, by the way.
When I asked a conservationist how to store the pictures she went into elaborate detail about archive quality boxes and layers of acid and lignin free tissue paper. She continued with suggestions about temperature controlled storage rooms and not allowing sunlight to touch the pictures. By this time my eyes had glazed over and my brain was giving up the will to listen. I thanked her and did nothing. I had to go to my favourite camera shop so I asked "Young Mr Davies" - Old Mr Davies was having a day off. YMD is my age so not really that young, but I digress. YMD said "How are they stored now?" I explained that my Granny had this tin Ditty box and they had been kept in there for all my mother's life and mine. "Leave 'em where they are," he said if they haven't deteriorated after 80 odd years then they won't deteriorate now.
So I asked him about scrapbooking them. "As long as you make sure the papers are acid free and anything you stick on the page is with a safe glue and is acid free - stay away from pages of books from after 1920 as they are dreadful!"SO my thought is this. When people use old book pages or "found items" for their pages how do they know that these items are safe to go against a precious picture?
I also worry about how the albums from a lifetime are going to be distributed amongst my three children. Should I insist that they are kept together and moved around the families every four months? should I make albums with the photos of the pages for each child and then put the real ones into the local archives or should I stop worrying and trust my children to pass on the information and albums properly...... sigh
