Product Description

Interest in genealogy often begins with a stack of old photos. Genealogists and non-genealogists love old photos, and many have collections of photos of their ancestors, but sadly are unaware of how to organize and properly care for these precious heirlooms. Preserving Your Family Photographs shows how to organize and store photographs so future generations can enjoy them. All genealogists, family historians and anyone with a desire to gather and preserve family photographs in an album will benefit from this book Readers will learn to care for photos, how to identify different types of damage and learn basic conservation techniques, how to buy the proper storage materials, how to organize the family photo archive, and how to safely display photographs. This book is a strong follow-up to Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs, which discussed how to identify types of old photos and how to interpret family history information in them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121042 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 109 pages

About the Author
Maureen Taylor is the author of Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs and Through the Eyes of Our Ancestors. She is a frequent lecturer at genealogical conferences and workshops across the country on the subject of photo identification, organization and preservation, and was the director of Library User Services for the prestigious New England Historical Genealogical Society in Boston.

Customer Reviews

Preserving you family Photographs: How to organize, present, and respotre your precious family images
Since I love photos old and young, I really enjoyed this book. It is important that we save what we have regardless of importance at this moment. I believe this book is a good way to learn how to handle our photos carefully so our descendants will have the joy to go through our photos.

Maureen Taylor
Does an excellent job of organizing and establishing time lines for photos. Very glad to find a copy.

Information Vague and Contradictory
Taylor may give readers a good place to start in their efforts to preserve family photographs, but offers information that is both contradictory and vague.

She gives a basic explanation of the "enemies" your photographs are facing, even breaking down information on particular types of photographs, tintypes, Polaroids, etc. But does not bother defining some basic terms in the glossary such as lignin. Nor are many of her suggestions for which supplies are appropriate specific enough. Eg., what kind of brush should I use to clean photos? I know that Nylon brushes are probably not soft enough for treasured photos. Even worse she says polyethylene is a bad material to store your photos in, but a few pages later suggests using polyethylene freezer bags for freezer storage of items.

Taylor includes lengthy lists of resources for, and more information on preservation. But some of the web addresses she lists no longer exist.

While she has some good suggestions for long-term storage of photo collections, I would not recommend this book to anyone trying to learn about photographic preservation.