In this portion of our latest webinar, Protecting Family Legacy Through Digitization: A Conversation, Director of Operations Hadley Grow talks with Anderson Archival client Kelly Donovan about how her collection came to be digitized.
If video isn’t for you, the transcript for this portion of the talk is below. To view the full webinar and transcript, fill out the form below to access the recording.
Transcript
Hadley: Kelly, would you mind telling us a little bit about your collection? For those that don’t know, we’ve seen about 10 scrapbooks of different times in your family’s history. How did you become the caretaker of the collection? And how was it originally stored?
Kelly: It beats me how that happened, except I was someone who had an office and files and so people naturally were giving me things. I helped with some of my grandparents’ and parents’ estates. Then I would accumulate paperwork from that. I had a certain interest in it all but people just started then handing it to me, handing it off, bins of it, to me.
How was it stored? Poorly! In my grandparents’ closet somewhere, in one of the great grandparents’ closet somewhere, my parents’ closets, so it was just stuff that was moved along in boxes. No protection at all. It’s kind of amazing that much of it survived. The screen you’re looking at is from 1921, photographs. They’re not bad considering lack of care.
Hadley: Tell us a little bit more. That’s so funny how usually one member of the family kind of becomes the dumping ground, you could say for, you know, handing off the collection. Are you saying basically multi generations, everyone just started giving you what they had of the pieces of the collection?
Kelly: It passed down largely through my parents when they died 15 years ago. They had inherited from their parents who had inherited from their parents, and it became a cone down to my parents. Then when they died, came to my generation. My siblings happily gave it all to me to deal with.
Hadley: Wonderful, that’s good back story. The storage, it was just in folders, there was no sort of care for the organization, the temperature where it was stored, it was just kind of there, right?
Kelly: That’s right, wherever it had landed. And nobody took these out again, ever, I don’t think. I never saw some of these 1921 ones until now. They were just in a closet somewhere.
Hadley: Now they’re accessible and you can actually enjoy it.
