LaGrange County Historical Society, Inc.

P.O. Box 134

LaGrange, Indiana 46761

Preserving Your Family Heirloom Photographs

Compiled by Charlotte Hill Edsall, 2008

Congratulations!! The good-old hard days are over!! We don’t have to decide which person “gets” our family photo collection anymore. No hard feelings, no conflict, only satisfaction for everyone. It is easier than ever to digitally preserve your family photos and each family member will receive a copy of everything.

With proper care and storage your original black and white prints could last 150 years and the negatives perhaps longer. If the word digital seems scary to you, don’t worry. Go to Wal-Mart, WalGreens, or any photo specialty store and they will help you. That is their job and more than that, those ladies and gentlemen love to help others. Make sure if you are scanning prints to make copies that you pay a few dollars more and have it put on a CD-ROM disc. Doing that, you can now share it with many people, because you just produce duplicate copies of the disc. Better yet, grab a grandchild and their scanner and I am sure they can help you do this project. Then you not only are preserving the memories but you are sharing time and stories with the younger generations.

It is said that each individual has elements of over 1,000 of their ancestors just in our facial expression alone. Photographs are the bridge between the ages. They are the best gift at holidays and the easiest way to look back in time. In the simplest form, they prove where we came from. We find ourselves in them, our nose, eyes, hair, and the way we laugh. Who will see that photo someday and recognize their self because of the time you took in being preservationist. It will be worth your time. Even looking at the walls of one photo at my Great Grandparents’ home, David and Zelma Hart, I discovered that I have the set of pictures hanging on my wall that was Grandma’s. Now, when you are preserving your photos, you can look into the future and imagine what your family will be thinking when they see this one or wonder what it is you are doing.

Some Photo- Preservation Tips In Charlotte’s “Opinion”

1. If you are scanning a picture, make sure the scanner top is clean and not smudged with oily fingerprints. Also, make sure the picture is in the proper spot on the scanner. Ask if you aren’t sure. It is usually the top right had corner, but not always.

2. You can change the orientation (Direction) the photo is, but even if you don’t, it will still print out alright. Scan at the highest quality resolution possible.

3. On old photographs, we don’t always have the highest resolution. In order to keep the quality that we do have it is best to avoid “zooming in” or “cropping” on the photo. You can change a photo to sepia or black and white, but you can’t go to color from a black and white source that I know of.

4. You can enlarge a photo, but you have to keep in mind that the quality can decrease the bigger a photo is altered to especially if it was not of a high quality to begin with.

5. Use the Auto smart or Auto Corrector if available when you are scanningmart or Auto Corrector if available. It will sharpen a photo and help with the color with no work on your par. It will sharpen a photo and help with the color with no work on your part.

6. Document who, when and where on any photos that is possible to do so. Use your best handwriting, a black pen and acid free stickers. It is great to write on an index card and attach it to the photo with plastic covered paper clips, but you must remember that they can get separated and then all the information is lost.

7. If you write on the back of a photo, try to do so neatly on the back and towards the bottom or very top, do not press hard or you can hurt the photo front. It is a good idea to use acid free, smudge free writing pens, you can find those anywhere, or acid free labels you want to adhere to the back of the photo. Don’t write on the fronts of pictures.ur best handwriting, a black pen and acid free stickers. It is great to write on an index card and attatch it to the phot

8. Take time to write on the photos you are taking today and be one step ahead in thirty+ years!!

9. You might say, “I don’t have a computer, why go digital with my prints?” Well, the only answer for that is simply put. You will be able to preserve more photos for everyone in the extended family, thus you will be preserving your ancestors in more ways than one album. They will be remembered and honored and not tossed in a box of photos labeled “UNKNOWN.”

10. Write, write, and write. There comes a day for almost everyone when we hear ourselves saying, “I wish I would have asked Great Grandma this, or what did Grandpa say about that?” You will find your memories of a photo might spark a memory. This is how the everyday man is immortalized in my opinion. Take the time to write your story down.

11. Negatives can be very brittle and curl up. Don’t touch them with your bare hands or they will smudge. If you have a light shadow box, you can get a better idea of what the photo is by laying it on top of the light box. You can get negatives made into photos as well, and although I am not sure of the cost, they can now scan your photo negatives and preserve them digitally.

12. I am leery of printing at home on home printers for preservational use of photographs. I have photos that I will not ever have access to again that I tried that technique with. I used the best ink, matching paper, highest quality and lowest speed. Now 10 years later, the ink is fading. I feel that this important of a project is worth scanning prints and labeling them. That being said, I know many people that swear by it, I just don’t. I am not a professional photographer, but neither are they.

13. COPYWRIGHT LAWS – Neither am I a lawyer, so this is just my personal experience. If a photo was made in a studio, you have to obtain a release to copy it. Well if that photo is over a hundred years old, HOW? You can write studios like Olan Mills and such and buy a copyright release form. I have done it and it is not expensive. There is one thing you should know, there in no copyright on any MILITARY photos, you have the freewill to get those copied.

14. PLEASE - DON”T SCRAPBOOK WITH ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS. THEY WILL NOT BENEFIT FROM BEING CUT OR PASTED. THEY WILL BE TORN OFF OF PAGES SOMEDAY. Mark your albums on the front page, “These are original photographs, if you use this CD or these negatives I have made, you can make copies of any picture in this album.”

15. Avoid Rubber cement and magnetic photo albums, they are not good for photographs. They will destroy them. If you have photos in magnetic albums. They need to be carefully removed.

We are at a time when photography is changing once again. Digital photos are wonderful and I love them, but we are back to the same old problem. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? You must save your digital file with a name or have individual files of a person to locate the pictures in or in 40 years, “even though we will never forget,” we can’t remember which child was wearing the underwear over their head in this picture and was that Dad’s aunt or Mom’s? Time marches on and our memory marches the other direction, so take a few minutes and write it down. So now we know that I am not a professional photographer, not a lawyer, and certainly not a great writer, but what I am is a person who loves to preserve history. I am a person who loves to share family photos with as many people as possible. I am a person who is eternally grateful that so many friends and family have shared with me and my children.

Point to Remember:

Our Ancestors took these lovely heirloom photographs in order to preserve a moment, a person, place, or even an idea. Any surviving picture is special because it has survived and pictures are fragile. Honor your family and friends by sharing their photographs and they will be remembered by so many more people.