Mission to save family collections

September 5, 2023
By Vicki Entreken

Picture a box of photo albums, letters, framed pictures, and books shoved behind other forgotten items in an attic where temps can rise above 120 degrees if you’re in south Florida where I grew up. Moisture fogs up the photo albums. Mold grows, eating away at the image of your grandfather’s face. Bugs burrow into and lay eggs in the bindings of the books. Gross.

I’ve seen it. My mother’s collection (found in three secret boxes under her bed) was in horrific condition. If you catch the mold early enough, you might be able to remove it carefully with a soft cotton rag. Hers was too late as you can see in the photograph below. Here’s what truly sucks: this is the only image I have of the grandfather I never met.

I can’t even see his face.

🙏 Please don’t let this happen to your family’s photographs. 🙏

In the 80s, we thought “magnetic” photo albums were fine until you open one now, forty years later, and discover that the pictures, now faded to shades of orange and red, fall out in disarray. The adhesive is the culprit! The longer you keep your photos in those “magnetic” albums (which were never magnetic to begin with) the worse they will get.

Digitize the album.

1. Take photos of each page before you pull them out to maintain the order, if you care about that.
2. Scan the prints. I suggest scanning all of them and decide later which ones to keep or toss. You never know when you’ll stumble on an idea or story to tell.
3. Decide if you want to replace the photo album with a new version, or
4. Preserve the prints in polypropylene sleeves for future use.

When I found the old photograph above, it changed my life. At first I was looking at strangers. Then after researching clues in the boxes, they morphed into my mother’s biological parents. Then I realized they weren’t just her parents, they were my relatives too. Sounds weird, but she was adopted, so I already had grandparents as I knew them. It all happened so fast! My own biological grandmother and grandfather, who I never got to meet, were staring at me from a photograph. The longer I studied them, the more I wanted to know. Why did my mother keep them a secret? She’s not here now to tell me.

Save the stories.

My Aunt Leah used to work with a company who helped pack up the family belongings of those moving into assisted living or other places. I asked her how they saved the photo albums and boxes of photographs. Many times they didn’t. The children of those families just didn’t care. It broke her heart to toss so many family histories into the trash. Picturing her doing it breaks mine too. I wouldn’t have ever found her, and she wouldn’t be a part of my life if I had tossed my mother’s secret boxes in the trash when she passed.

If I’d found the picture of my grandparents while Mom was still here, I know I could have gotten some answers, but that didn’t happen. It was too late. Ever since then, I’ve been on a mission! First to save my mother’s collection. She had more than photographs in those secret boxes. I digitized all of her pictures, letters, poetry and other writings; then organized and preserved them safely in archival boxes.

Preserve the collection.

Hurricane Ian wiped out Fort Myers Beach and severely crippled the rest of Lee County and surrounding areas. My family could have lost an entire collection of photographs curated throughout the past 80-plus years. They were lucky. Others not so much, and I feel for them. Family photographs are priceless.

As Fort Myers Beach and the rest of Lee County rebuilds, I’m digitizing and preserving my father’s prints, slides, and negatives; another part of my mission. Seeing these slides, some from before I was born, is teaching me about history, family dynamics, and at times, reminds me that loved ones will not be here forever.

A collection this large (Dad is a photographer) cannot exist without stories. Within Dad’s collection, we found some of his father’s old negatives; pictures my dad had either never seen or didn’t remember, like the family photo below.

Shaw family: Dennis & Dean (front), Carroll, Doug, Susan, Yvonne. (ca. 1946-47)

If you’re interested in more details on digitizing photographs, preserving, or physically archiving them, sign up below and stay tuned for more articles.

Collections provide history. In my grandfather’s collection, I found many before and after slides and negatives of the property where he remodeled an old grocery building into his own drive-through TV repair shop.

The progress of this rebuild, especially including before and after images of the property, is culturally significant. There’s a story behind these photos that only my father, his brother, and my Uncle Ray can tell. Everyone else is gone. The time to collect those stories is now.

Build an online archive and get everyone’s help!

The great news is that you don’t have to do it alone. I found a family archive builder at We Are… (WeAre.xyz) where I can post the photographs I’m digitizing, and then invite family to comment on them, write stories about them, or add photographs, documents, and stories of their own.

I’ve been hearing about We are… for a while from users in the genealogy world and from its developer, Simon Davies, who personally helped me get set up yesterday. Uploading my existing family tree from Ancestry.com was easy, as was migrating an article from Secret Boxes into We Are…’s content management system.

I have only begun building our family’s archive in We are… and I’m super excited. Now, I have a few helpful tutorials to watch, so stay tuned as I share my experience there and as they continue to add features. Check out their background story here.

Don’t wait for the mold or bugs or a hurricane that starts with the letter “I” to wipe out your family’s priceless photographs and documents. Start saving them now.

I will collect and save every story I can. I hope you do too.

Thank you for reading. 
I appreciate you.
~ Vicki