Many of us, no doubt, have seen in our travels remnants of someone's personal history collection. Maybe an old, but beautiful photo album in an antique store, filled with period photos of "someone's" family; a box of collected miscellany sitting in the back corner of a thrift shop or on the auction block somewhere -- or worse, as Arlene Eakle experienced, in trash bag awaiting the dumpster. How those materials arrived at that spot is a mystery, but most likely were, at some point, among one person's or one family's treasures. Today, more and more, we are finding efforts within the genealogical community to receive and preserve these abandoned records. In a recent article, "What will happen to my research?," Alan Smith suggests some options for those who may looking to archive their family record, to save others from making the decisions.

Labels: family history, preservation

You know the old saying about putting all your eggs in one basket. The rule applies to many things, including money and your treasured family photos, something money can't buy. Thanks to modern technology, we have a way to preserve and protect old family pictures by scanning them. As Shelley Poblete notes in her article, "Photographs: The Importance of Sharing," scanning preserves the image in its current state, even though the original may continue to deteriorate. But she also notes that scanning them and storing them in your own home is not enough -- to finish the job of preservation, they need to be distributed. You need to share them. With the holiday season at hand, a CD of your old photos may be the perfect gift.

Labels: family history, preservation

"Tombstones won’t always look new and they shouldn’t." Before heading out to the cemetery with good intentions, you may want to take a moment to think carefully about your plans to tidy up. An article in the News Examiner - Enterprise, "Don't bleach or scrub that tombstone," provides a number of tips for what NOT to do when cleaning cemetery headstones. Based recommendations from a National Park Service preservation workshop we find many of the methods commonly used to clean tombstones actually destroy the stone.

Having attended the workshop, Shirley Pettingill who oversees maintenance of Ross and Worcester cemeteries in Park Hill, Oklahoma notes, "cleaning a tombstone is a lot different than cleaning a bathroom." Using chemicals on a tombstone will ruin it. "People mean well, but they don’t realize that what they’re doing can be more harmful than helpful,” she said. Even the simple practice of "chalking" or "rubbing" will wear down the headstone.

"I learned so much at that seminar,” said Pettingill, “A lot of us just looked at each other and said, ’Oh! We’ve been so bad!” For more information on "Cleaning a Stone Grave Marker" and other topics, visit the National Center for Preservation Technology & Training web site.

Labels: cemeteries, preservation