Starting a family archive: count the collection and fix storage before buying anything

What to take away

Start with a count, not a purchase

Family archives usually arrive on someone else's schedule. A house has to be cleared, and eight or twelve cartons come home with whoever had room. The instinct is to order boxes immediately. Resist that for a weekend.

Instead, open every carton and sort into broad piles on a clean floor. Group loose prints, albums, negatives, slides, and letters. Add legal and financial records, clippings, tapes and discs, and non-paper items, and count each pile roughly.

Two hundred loose prints and four shoeboxes of negatives are different purchases, and you will not know which you have until the floor is covered.

Fix the location before the containers

Storage conditions do more work than storage products. The New York State Archives, in its guidance on simple steps to preserving family treasures, suggests filtered air, a temperature of 72F or below, and relative humidity between 45 and 55 percent.

It suggests a shortcut: if you are comfortable, your treasures probably are too. The Archives says plainly what to avoid: heat sources, exterior walls, basements and attics.

Most homes have one spot that meets this: an interior closet on the ground or first floor, away from plumbing, radiators and the water heater. Find it first.

A rated archival box in an unheated attic is worse than a cardboard carton in the hall closet, because the attic swings forty degrees a day and the closet does not.

Keep the order you were given

Archivists call it original order, and it is the one thing a household collection can lose permanently in an afternoon. If your grandmother kept every letter from one correspondent in one bundle, that bundle tells you who mattered to her. Sorted into a new chronological file, it says nothing.

Where the order is genuinely random, impose one and note that you did. Where it is not, leave it and describe it.

What the first pass actually is

National Archives conservator Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler, writing on treating memories as documents, sets the standard: do no harm.

Handle paper with two clean hands, open folded letters carefully, never back-fold to flatten, never mend with glue or tape, never trim an original. Stop if your work seems to cause damage.

That divides the work:

Anything reversible is safe now. Anything irreversible needs a second look once you know the whole collection, which is what the first pass gives you.

Where the real risk sits

The risks are dull and mostly environmental: damp, heat, light, pests, and one well-meant repair. If the boxes sat in a garage for six years, mold and insects come before sleeves. If they sat in a bedroom cupboard, the real risk is you, working too fast on a Sunday.

Materials matter too, and their labels are less regulated than they look. Our guide to what acid-free and archival actually mean covers the terms on the packaging, and the notes on damage that is hard to undo cover what to avoid in month one.

Common questions