Preserving Your Family History: Scrapbooks

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I hope you're feeling pretty good now at how your special family photographs, documents and treasures are looking since we've started working on preserving them. Today we're going to conquer scrapbooks. I think people usually have a couple hanging around but sometimes you can end up with quite a few of them. Especially when you become the de facto family historian! 

Older scrapbooks (think 1920s & 1930s) can be extremely fragile and brittle because their age and the type of paper used then. I have a number of family scrapbooks that are in a more delicate state. Gaylord Archival has actually been working to develop a line of scrapbook boxes so I was able to test one hot off the assembly line. 

You might have noticed that this box is a different color than the other archival boxes. Gaylord is actually testing this new white color. For museums the color doesn't really matter since no one really sees them regularly but staff but Gaylord thought that for those of us doing our own personal archiving that we would like a color that would better suit our home decor. That way we can integrate it into our home decor. I'm actually right there with them with the decor in my mom's house the white box looks natural and not an eyesore. At first I was a little worried that the white might scuff but I've been moving it around a bunch with this project and have had no issues!

First thing you want to do is to pad out the extra space in the box using Unbuffered Acid-Free Tissue. I don't want my scrapbooks moving around inside the box. Since I needed the tissue for other projects it was a bit small so I needed several pieces to make sure everyone was buffered nicely.

You might have really thick scrapbooks that take up all the depth of the box or you might have super thin ones and can fit several in one box. Be sure to think of it like a pyramid you don't want anyone on top hanging over since that's not good for the scrapbook. You'll want to put sheets of tissue in-between each layer, for protection but I also write what the scrapbook is below. Since it's written in pencil it's slightly hard to make out. Remember we want to record as much information as we can about items.

If you are putting several scrapbooks into one box be sure to pad out the edges as you go. So by the end there will be a nice barrier all the way to the top of the box.

Voila! Our scrapbooks are snug as bugs in a rug in their new homes. Do you have really old family scrapbooks? What kind of wonderful family memories are in them?

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