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Caring for your family papers – Getting organised 

We all have letters, legal documents, birth and marriage certs, exam or awards certificates, photographs and albums. We might even have newspaper cuttings, magazines or articles torn out of them, tickets from events and shows, postcards and bits of ephemera that mean something to us and our family, and we want to keep them safe.

At a very basic level we can say that our documents get damaged in two main ways- through how they are kept and how we look at them. If we want to get technical about it, we can call this environmental damage and physical damage.

This post will look at how we keep our family papers and the next post will discuss consulting and handling your family papers without causing damage.

Where do you keep your family papers?

Most people don’t live in a museum or archive and therefore there is little point expecting that you can control the environment the way that an institution might. But you can monitor your environment, in fact we do every day, when you turn on and off your home heating, or take off a jumper if the room gets too warm.

We know that attic spaces and basements are prone to being cold and damp in winter and then hot and dry in the summer. In most modern homes a cool, dry place might be a spare room or a dining room which has background heating most of the time. Where are you comfortable in your house?

Your storage area

• Store the documents in a room in the house where you would be comfortable; cold or damp rooms should be avoided
• Attics, basements and sheds are vulnerable to the extremes of temperature, damp and dust
• Keep items away from sources of leaks and floods such as pipes, windows or known roof leaks
• To keep the documents safe and together put them inside a paper folder in a box, clearly labelled
• Store them inside a cabinet or in a drawer in a horizontal and flat position

What to store your family papers in

Conservators write a lot about using archive grade materials to store our records in, archival folders and boxes, which are acid free and have an extra reserve of alkaline in them to help slow down the rate of deterioration. But it can be unreasonable to expect everyone to have access to these sorts of materials.

So, what can you use? Well you can be very resourceful and creative with very little, here is how:

The Box

Ideally yes, you would like a box made from good quality materials, one that is a good size and that everything will fit into, without being crushed or damaged.

Boxes with a base and a lid are good, as it is easy to open them and gain access to the contents, so gift boxes and shoe boxes can be good. A word of caution though, biscuit tins should be avoided as the tin will tend to rust over the years. Remember if you haven’t got an acid free box lying around to be used, there is nothing to say that you can’t change the box or upgrade the box in a year or so. Also, if you have a lot of documents to store and need two or three boxes that is fine as well.

Any box will do three key things:

1. Keep everything together- so nothing gets lost
2. Keep the light off the documents and photographs
3. Keeps the dust and pests away

Inside the box

So, what is inside the box along with all your documents?

Have a list of everything- I know my archivist colleagues will thank me for this suggestion, but so will your family. You might know what everything is and why it is being kept, but do others? Noting what is in the box is an effective way of making sure that your knowledge is shared and that your family history is secure. Also, if you have time, do what the monks used to do and transcribe the handwritten notes and letters- making a copy of something is one on the primary ways to ensure that the information doesn’t get lost.

Paper folders– paper folders can be made from a sheet of paper- I realised recently that I make paper folders to fit all shapes and sizes of documents out of a sheet of A3 paper. A simple single creased paper folder can protect a damaged or fragile document, even one that is in pieces. We can also learn a lot from the past- it is very common to see simple paper wrappers on bundles of documents that are also annotated and tell you what is in the bundle, if they could do it in the 18^th Century, there is nothing to say we can’t do it in the 21^st!

Silica Gel packets– do you recognise these, you might find them in a new box of a pair of shoes or a handbag, sometimes you’ll find them in boxes or storage containers. How often do you put them in the bin?

These little packets of silica gel are there to absorb excess moisture whilst items are in storage; so if they work to look after your new shoes and handbags, they will work looking after you family papers.

Gather these packets up and pop them in your storage box; when you check the box if they are hard and solid, it means that the crystals inside have absorbed excess moisture. Now you need to do 2 things:

1. Replace the silica gel packet
2. Find somewhere different to store your box- there is too much moisture in the air in the current storage place.

Outside of the box -Digitisation at home

You have all heard about archives digitising collections and making them accessible online; you can do the same at home. Technology has given us digitisation at our fingertips- well either on a camera or smart phone. Here are some reasons why it is a good idea,

• Take a photograph of each document to have a record of it.
• Take a photograph of both the front and the back of the document in case there are annotations on the back.
• This will give you a copy of the document which can be shared with other family members
• This means that the documents can be looked at and discussed without having to handle the original all the time.
• It means that the photograph can be displayed, and the original kept safely out of the light.
• It also records the condition of the document as it is now.

These are just some ideas of things we can do at home to look after our family papers, they may not be worth thousands of euro and important to the world at large, but to each of us and our families they are precious.

See here for part two where we learn how to handle the material and to prevent causing damage in the first place.

Zoë Reid, Senior Conservator

The rights of women – what are they?

The rights to labour and to pray;

The right to watch whilst others sleep;

The right o’er others woes to weep;

The right to succour in reverse;

The right to bless while others curse;

The right to love whom others scorn;

The right to comfort all that mourn;

The right to shed new joy on earth;

The right to feel the souls high worth;

The right to lead the soul to god;

Along the path her saviour trod –

The path of meekness and of love,

The path of faith that leads above,

The path of patience and of wrong,

The path in which the weak grow strong,

Such’s women’s rights – and god will bless

And crown their champion with success.

Ref. 2014/75

The above poem, a variation of a Christian verse first published in 1855, was entered into a scrapbook by a Mrs Little on July 5^th 1884. Scrapbooking was a very common pastime in the 19^th century, especially for women and children, and the example that we hold in our collection is typical of the time. Ephemera such as greetings cards, trade cards, newspaper cuttings and coloured images were cut out and pasted into a book that often acted as a keepsake of interests and memories of the creator. Family, friends and visitors were requested to contribute favourite quotations or verse and the ‘Rights of Women’, as contributed by Mrs Little, is a reflection of the notion of the ‘ideal Christian woman’; a woman who is pious and virtuous.  Also amongst the pastings in this book are images of cultures from around the world which possibly hint that the scrapbooker was interested in the world beyond the domestic, and perhaps even had aspirations to travel and explore the wider world.  At present this scrapbooker is ‘anonymous’ but with a little research it might be possible to identify her and find out if the snapshot contained within the scrapbook reflected her future life.

Conservation of ballad sheets for the online exhibition ‘Singing Sedition: ballads and verse in the age of O’Connell’.

 During the early part of the 19^th Century ballad sheets containing the lyrics to songs and verses on topical subjects such as religion and politics were widely produced and circulated. Also known as penny ballads or broadside ballads, they were sold cheaply and therefore had to be cheap to produce.

These narrow strips of paper are printed on one side with small type and a woodcut illustration. A considerable quantity were found folded and tucked carefully within letters sent to the Chief Secretary’s Office at Dublin Castle in the 1820s and 1830s, and these form the basis of our current online exhibition.

In preparation for the exhibition, a small selection were highlighted and brought to conservation for treatment before digitisation. As often happens when a series is highlighted it provides an opportunity to look at the housing of the material to improve long term preservation and ensure continued access to it.

Production

From visual inspection, clues into the production of the ballad sheets were deduced. Often the ballad sheets have a clean blade cut along one side and a build-up of paper pulp (a deckled edge) along the other long side.  It might be suggested that these ballad sheets were printed on the offcut of large sheets that had been discarded on the printmaker’s floor.

The composition of standard black printing ink has changed remarkably little over the centuries. Most contain a carbon black pigment and vegetable oil, usually boiled linseed oil, so the print is clear and shows little signs of ageing over the years.

A variety of different types of wove paper had been used, a range of colours, blue, ivory, white or off-white and the thickness of the paper varied as well; some were very thin and delicate. The uniformity comes from their format and general size, 90 mm x 325 mm.

Condition and treatment

The ballad sheets were usually folded, crumpled at the edges, often with a build-up of dirt along the lower edges, a few had small tears and creases.

The light dirt on the surface of the papers was removed with small squares of smoke sponge; a conservation eraser. To reduce the soiling in the papers, it was decided to move on to a wet cleaning method; blotter washing. This is a method where the document is placed on one or two layers of wet blotting paper, which acts as a water reservoir. The more layers of blotting paper, the more water can be added.

The ballad sheet was placed in a flat tray on the wet blotting paper stack and left for ten minutes during which time the soluble elements (dirt) migrated out of the document into the blotting paper.  The blotters were exchanged for clean ones until no further discolouration transferred on to the blotters. It should be noted that a layer of silk screen material was placed between the document and the wet blotter to make it easier to handle and lift the wet piece of paper during the treatment.  After blotter washing the documents were dried and pressed flat.

One ballad sheet was in two pieces held together with sellotape, the plastic tape had degraded to the level where it was simply falling away from the document, although the adhesive had left quite a stain behind. After blotter washing, a 12 gsm OK tissue; a Japanese Kozo tissue was used as a backing paper to keep the two pieces of the torn ballad sheet together.

Improving housing

To allow the documents to remain flat a simple single creased paper folder was made from an A3 sheet of archival paper, which was trimmed to size (15cm x 36cm). The ballad sheets were held in place with two Mylar V hinges, like straight photo corners, that they slide into. Using this method means access to the back of the sheet is straightforward, which is important as there can be annotations on the back of the sheet.

The digitisation of these ballad sheets is an effective preservation tool and it provides the means to increase the awareness of the ballad sheets within the collection through the online exhibition and social media posts.

To see the results of this work, and find out more about the Ballad sheets check out the online exhibition https://www.nationalarchives.ie/article/singing-sedition-ballads-verse-age-oconnell/

Zoë Reid, Senior Conservator