Preserving Family Collections
Who We Serve
Family Collections
Family history is more than a collection of dates and events; it’s a rich tapestry of stories, achievements, and treasured memories. Transform your family collection of cherished photographs, letters, and artifacts into high-quality digital formats, allowing you to revisit and share those priceless moments anytime and anywhere.
Preserving Family Legacy
Your family’s legacy is a gift to the future. Digitized collections create a bridge between past and present, offering your children and grandchildren a unique window into their heritage. The more generations connect with how they came to be, the more families can continue to honor their past in ways that ensure they never take their present for granted.
Why Preserve Your Legacy Digitally?
Many people end up in possession of a collection of family photos, letters, slides, videos, and other ephemera that they aren’t sure what to do with. These items are often too fragile, too disorganized, or simply too many in size to be displayed or enjoyed. Consider digitally preserving your family collection. Time is not on your side. Physical items will only continue to deteriorate, and the people who know the most need to capture the details of those memories before it’s too late.
Anderson Archival is for families who want bespoke service for their legacy preservation needs.
The Process for Preserving Your Family Collection
Because we know that shoving your irreplaceable memories in a box and shipping them off to become a barcode in a giant mystery warehouse full of strangers is not what our clients want, we focus on the human element first and always.
1. Personalized Consultation
Trained and certified archival consultants will work with you and your family to understand the specific needs and unique stories behind your family collections. We deliver you a collaborative project plan and documented requirements for your approval after conversations about the special elements of your family's history.
2. Digital Capture
Using state-of-the-art technology, our team meticulously digitizes each item, treating everything with the utmost care, using the same archival equipment as renowned institutions like the Smithsonian. We send samples for your approval and allow you to select the settings, filters, and file naming conventions that work best for you.
3. Legacy Curation
Once digitized, your now digital treasures can then be curated into a personalized legacy portfolio. The possibilities are endless and our staff of archive specialists with advanced degrees and education can work with you to weave your family narrative into an enriching digital story designed to be accessible and preserved for all time.
Envision Your Legacy Protected and Preserved
Picture a future where your grandchildren marvel at stories from a past they feel deeply connected to. One where every family gathering is enriched by shared histories vividly brought to life. It’s not just about having a vague notion of where you come from, it’s about truly experiencing the details and imagery in ways that allow you to pass it on. This is the challenge and purpose for every archivist working for you.
People don’t think a lot about building that connection with a family that’s dispersed, especially during a pandemic. What a role these letters have played in a time when we haven’t even been able to have a service or a mass for my mom. We’ve been able to have a memorial weekend—memorialized both of them, actually—in a way that probably we wouldn’t have done if we hadn’t been in the middle of a pandemic.
The letters just keep giving us the opportunity to connect. The ability to read them chronologically without the hassle of opening them and unfolding them, and just the fact that we can scale it digitally is the number one benefit.
Start Your Journey
Discover how we can help you preserve your family collection. We are here to explore how to collaboratively safeguard your family’s priceless memories.
Memories to Last a Lifetime—and Longer
Digitally preserving family collections often means protecting precious memories. No one expects a fire, flood, or other disaster to destroy these irreplaceable items until it happens to them. With digitization, you don’t have to risk losing photos and documents to disaster or the degradation of time; even if the originals are lost or destroyed, the digital copies will still exist.
Disasters aren’t the only thing that can harm your collection. The materials that compose these items will degrade over time, spurred on by UV light, humidity, and other environmental conditions. This degradation may be particularly pronounced on photos, often in the form of fading, silvering, and discoloration, while paper items may become yellow and brittle, easily breaking apart. Once these processes have begun to affect items, it is critical to digitally capture them before the degradation worsens and information is lost.
Digitization isn’t all Anderson Archival can do to protect your collection, either. We also offer arrangement and rehousing of the originals. Arranging creates a functional organizational system for your family documents, making them easy to look through and quickly find what you’re searching for. Rehousing them safely in archival materials maximizes the lifespan of your collection and ensures they can be protected for years to come.
A Digital Reunion
Another major benefit of a digitized family collection is that it can be shared with anyone. When photos and documents only have a single physical copy, their access is limited to those who are able to see them in person. With a parent company in Anderson Technologies that is focused on IT consulting, cybersecurity, and confidentiality, Anderson Archival offers multiple options such as digital access management services or a password-protected website so that no matter how geographically dispersed your family members may be, everyone is able to enjoy the family history. For those who prefer a non-digital experience, there’s also the option of using your high-quality scans to compile your own book to be printed on-demand for your family members!
Your family’s history is a priceless treasure, a narrative of love, triumph, and resilience. Don’t let these memories slip into obscurity. Seize this opportunity to preserve and relive them in a way that only our bespoke digital legacy services can provide.
