A few weeks ago a good friend Cameron who helped create, preserve, share and star in one of the greatest historical collections we own made a comment on Facebook about not being sure how the collection was being stored and it dawned on me: we’ve gone to great lengths to protect the things we’ve been entrusted with but we’ve never shared the details. Today, in what I hope will become a series of how we archive all our collections, we’ll go over how we store and protect what we’re calling “The Lost Northside Negatives”.
How did we start?
We’ve all seen the meme’s in our socials about how Gen-X had the advantage of growing up hanging out and going to parties without anyone having a camera. For us, that wasn’t the case. When I was 14 my Mom took my request for a camera for Christmas and bought me a Nikon EM 35mm SLR with a 50mm lens.
About this time the whole neighborhood group was increasingly into BMX riding, first racing and then tricks. Skateboarding was soon in the mix and a lot of the kids in the little town of Racine, Wisconsin were quickly trying to emulate the riders and skaters in Southern California often by capturing our own photos to match the pictures we saw in all the BMX/Skating magazines. Film and developing was expensive, and we were young, so we’d scrape together $15 however we could to shoot and develop a roll. Eventually some of us had jobs and so we’d buy more film, and I often had that camera on my shoulder, and we shot roll after roll.
How we created the collection
From 1984 to around 1992 first myself, then Cameron and other friends, we’re shooting the events of our daily lives, the riding, the skating, the parties, the hanging out almost like the youth today with their phones. And this was the prime Gen-X 80’s when we were feral children, we’d be up early and out of the house all day deep into the night with little parental oversight. And there was a camera on my shoulder for much of it.
We would take the developed rolls and go through the 3” x 5” images to pick out the best, put them in photo albums, not care about the negatives at all or the prints we didn’t like so they got shoved in a drawer in Cameron’s bedroom forgotten about. Honestly, I can’t explain how we didn’t just throw them out like we did most of the prints we didn’t use. There were several hundreds of rolls of 24 or 36 images taken over the years and thousands of images total shoved in a drawer and forgotten about as we all grew up and moved out of Racine.
About 10 years ago Cameron came to the house and dropped the bomb that his mom, 20 years earlier, found the negatives when she was cleaning out his childhood bedroom and saved them all. She put the sleeves into a grocery bag and then put into an orange milk crate and stored in her attic. Approximately 5,000-10,000 35mm images documenting our shenanigans from the ages of 14-22 had survived.
How we’re protecting our collections
When we bought the house my family lives in now, during the showing, we found a room in the basement that is cinder block on two sides, shelves on the others, is window-less and has a drain in the middle of the floor. We jokingly called it “the murder room” because it was pretty creepy, but as I moved all our genealogy collections in I realized this was the perfect place to store them.
It’s smaller than the rest of the basement, so easier to climate control, it has many shelves and plenty that are over 3’ off the floor, and it’s clear that basement has never leaked. The drain leads to the city storm sewer so even if the basement flooded the drain would keep this area dry and we’d have our collections up off the floor.
We’ve installed portable heating and cooling units in the room (now called the “genealogy room”…much better than it’s old name!) as well as humidifier and de-humidifiers. With that, we can keep the space at 55 degrees (+/- 5 degrees) and 35% humidity (+/- 5%) which is close to optimal for medium term storage of our documents, historical photographs, and our photographic negatives.
Long term it’s important that all family historians look to move their collections to more professional organizations for proper safe keeping (link), but it’s increasingly difficult to find archives that are willing to take in new collections due to the costs. It’s expensive to properly archive them, and then store them, so we’re putting in the time, effort and cost of using professional archiving supplies to store our collections.
How we’re protecting the Lost Northside Negatives collection
Beyond keeping them in a temperature and humidity-controlled space, we’re purchasing professional archiving supplies from Hollinger Metal Edge (link). A polyester sleeve holds each negative strip with each of the sleeves for a particular roll collected inside of an acid-free paper envelope. The envelopes then stored in a buffered acid-free metal edge box.
When we scan in each roll (more to come on that!) we clean each negative with a lint-free cloth and proper cleaning solution, then place them in the sleeves/folders/boxes. The supplies work out to be about $3/roll, and I expect we’ll spend another $2,000 to $3,000 on archiving supplies to finish the collection. But, it’s worth it because not only are we ensuring the negatives are as protected as possible, by using top-quality supplies and industry best-proactive for archiving it’s more likely that if we ever want to donate these to a museum or archive they will accept them because there is less work for them to do to bring them into their collections.
What’s next
The negatives that somehow survived history are now well kept with full protection. I am taking longer than I would like to scan and present them because I have too many projects to manage, archival supplies are expensive, and the work itself is time-consuming. I’ve digitized about 1000 images so far (The Lost Northside Negatives) and each roll takes about 4 hours to fully process, so that effort took about three and a half work weeks. Now that we’ve got a new batch of supplies in I’m able to process a new set of negatives, but in the meantime they are protected and kept safe!