Superbyways Webster

It’s now cheap and easy to preserve family history, says WEBSTER

I’VE BEEN helping to sort out the papers of a relative who died at a very good age, sifting through many years’ worth of the documents that life throws up and that we all effortlessly accumulate.

Most of it we could shred without qualm; nobody needs old electricity bills. However, we were left with a large pile of personal letters, emails, photos, familyrelated newspaper clippings and the like, gathered over seventy years or more. To us, this is a fascinating collection, but what should we actually do with it? If it remains in a box in the attic, in due course it will almost certainly rot, be eaten by mice or just forgotten. Even before that happens, it will be difficult to access.

Then it struck me: why not use a technique that is already popular in the business and academic worlds, and convert it all into a digital archive? It could then be easily sorted, duplicated, shared and studied.

This technique is becoming common; original papers are ‘scanned’ which means that pictures of them are stored in a computer, and the originals can be discarded. Scanners used to be expensive, but now there are good ones for under £100.

It is not a difficult process, but it needs thinking through. There are three golden rules. First, decide what you really want to keep (be firm); second, get it rigorously organised into categories and give each electronic file a helpful name (‘letter_from_queen_20_09_56’). This is where you should spend the most time, to make the archive easy to search. Third, save copies of the archive in different places, for safety, including (but not exclusively) an online service.

The bore is that each page has to be scanned individually; in my case, this

The original documents can then go back in the attic or be thrown away – if you have the courage

would be a very long job, as there are more than a thousand documents of all shapes and sizes.

Help is at hand; I will give the work to a scanning service. There are a lots of these, and the cost is fairly modest, perhaps 5p per page or so. Typically, they provide you with a DVD which has on it copies of all the documents, and, if you want it, a version of each document that has been ‘read’ (that is, converted into text) which can then be searched. This conversion process is a bit hit and miss, and doesn’t work on handwriting, but it’s a start.

You then copy these files onto your computer, and elsewhere, for safety; the archive is now secure, takes up no space, and is easily inspected. It will also make it simple for you to send the whole thing or individual documents to anyone who wants a copy. You could even publish them on a family website, but beware of breaching the rules of privacy and good manners.

The original documents can then go back into that box in the attic, or even be thrown away – if you have the courage. Historians of the future will thank you.

I have written more on this subject on my website (www.webstersblog.co.uk/ archive), with some advice on choosing a scanning service and archiving emails.