…were sitting safe in the securest corner of our basement.
Until we let one sprinkler hit a window. Which apparently needs caulk.
I am taking a break right now: my aching back—we are doing an Arno Flood style rescue of soaked diaries and photo albums. A corner of our basement is wet; and we are talking about historic photos—from a relative serving the US military in and out of Germany back in the 1930’s. Things like submarine drydocks, now-lost ships under way…just amazing things. Not to mention hourly weather observations in the north US in the 1920’s or 30’s….
And the irreplaceable family stuff. Birth certificates. Including information on a great-grandmother who lacks public records.
Oh, I tell you, water is a pernicious thing. We now have a dehumidifier, a potent one, running in that corner of the basement, and we are drying things out.
You might consider freezing them. It will stop any mold in its tracks and slowly dehydrate the paper. Especially good if pages are stuck together.
Thank you—I’d forgotten that trick.
I seem to recall that the Boston Public Library used the freezing technique after a flood on their lower level. They rented space in a meat locker – super cold temps there.
Oh no!
A link to a professional summation of the best ways to dry wet archives: http://www.neilsa.org/flood_recovery/dryingb_r.html ; remember that freezing fast and very cold and in a defrosting freezer can help, but otherwise ice-crystals can damage paper and make pages stick together (there’s also a Rescue-wet-books instructable about that).
I’ve personally put paper kitchen towels between wet magazine pages (after carefully blotting them) to stop them from sticking together, as it was impossible to spread them all out; they ended up very crinkly but otherwise it worked.
I hope you can find room to spread out all the affected papers as flat as possible, as I guess that’s the best you can do. Maybe borrow room in OSG and Sharon’s houses if everything won’t fit in yours?
After this emergency is over, you might consider putting all the important and irreplacable paper in plastic boxes with tight lids. Not just for preventing water damage, but also as a deterrent against paper-eating bugs like the paperfish (Ctenolepisma longicaudatum), a kind of silverfish which eats paper and starches, lives indoors and thrives in all temperatures and humidities that humans can live in. As far as I could find, it occurs worldwide; in Europe it’s been spreading north at a fast clip and has overrun the entire Netherlands in a few years, about a decade ago. We’ve had infestations in the town archives and they can do a tremendous amount of damage, and are almost impossible to get rid of without professional pest-control, except by sealing all paper and starch and such in airtight contaners for 3 months (and no wallpaper).
I’ve been told by someone who conserves old comics in individual plastic bags, that plastic softeners can damage the bond between ink and paper, and that the most easily visible check is that slightly cloudy clear plastic bags contains softener, and really clear plastic bags or wrappers are safer. I have no idea how that translates to sturdy lidded plastic boxes.
For such irreplacable archives it might be best to ask advice from professional archivists, for instance at the town archives. Here, the official advice is that acid-free cardboard boxes are the best for anything that needs to be stored 100 years or more, but those don’t help against the bugs! Then they have to poison-spray the vaults to get rid of those…
Maybe a belt-and-suspenders method: archival cardboard for folders, etc., then store them in watertight plastic containers?
Second the paper towels between pages method. You don’t want mold to get established!
Another thing you might look into is some of the commercial dehumidifying products, ranging from silica beads to closet crystals to aerogel (if you want to get ridiculous :)) A small canister of them in a plastic box will help sop up any unwanted moisture, but don’t get them in direct contact with the papers.
Be extra cautious with the photos, as the emulsion gets tacky if wetted and stays tacky for a while.
Yep, that’s what we do. 5 rolls of paper towels later, we seem to have a handle on it. We have a Westinghouse dehumidifier 4 feet from the boxes of film, negatives, and audio tapes. Fortunately some of them were protected in cans. Some weren’t but thank goodness the cans got wettest.
One of the things I recall from girl’s camp is that photos and negatives start their life sopping wet and survive a re-wetting very well if you don’t touch the emulsion. Sometimes that’s the kindest thing you can do to them, then hang them to dry in a controlled situation. We lost part of one of Ysabel’s best baby pix, but we can photoshop that in. That happened to be in there too— but in good shape, thank goodness, things like major ships under way (naval), with id, and submarine drydocks pre WWII, scenes of Jane’s relative in full naval uniform, etc. Really nice stuff, including some of the gun emplacements, coastal defenses, etc. These should be posted on the internet for people who may find them useful.
Regarding bugs: would something like diatomaceous earth be good against them? It works on other pests, and AFAIK, it’s PH-neutral.
Good suggestion: fortunately we’re ok with that down there. But I’ll remind Jane of that in the garden.
Thank you all: right now we’re only moderately damp on many and we’re using paper towels between sheets…but freezing is in the offing for some.
We are ordinarily very careful to preserve in plastic and acid-free, but these irreplaceable boxes (pasteboard) came from a beloved and recently lost parent’s apartment, and in the way of such things, it takes a while after losing someone before you’re quite ready to go in and do the clinically careful preservation thing: these were waiting (we thought safely) at the opposite end of the whole basement from any possible water-source, and sitting on plastic bins above any flood—we’d just never thought of an uncaulked window up in the living room.
Well, preservation has now slipped a lot higher on our to-do list.
Oh, my heart aches for you. I hope you’re able to salvage most if not all. Best of luck!
Oh no! I know the feeling. I lost some boxes of records and family mementos, irreplaceable, to water damage and mold, while moving things from my parents’ home, plus Tropical Storm Allison, and then later from an A/C drip pan leak. Some things are *still* boxed, to sort through. Plastic boxes, good idea.
Poor Jane and CJ, you must be both saddened and hacked.
Hanneke suggests: “Maybe borrow room in OSG and Sharon’s houses if everything won’t fit in yours?”
I’ll ask Sharon & see what she thinks. I’ll also ask OSGuy too. 😉
grin. Yep. But we’re ok in that regard: we just have the kitchen table stacked high with recovered journals, albums, etc. Let me tell you, I all but shed tears when I couldn’t afford the trip to Italy (I was a teacher) and help out in the Arno flood of 66, among the volunteers. I’d just got a job, and was poor as a churchmouse, but I really wanted my crack at saving those manuscripts. So I got my chance today—on more historical material…
We lost some family pictures to mold about 30 years ago, never did get those pictures back as we had the only copy of some.
Good luck to you in this.
That is so sad. My sympathies. Mold had only started on the leather album covers, and a 10% solution of Clorox helped that. Only one photo had mold, and I took the chance that a tiny breath of Clorox would be better than letting the mold go unchecked on it. The photo seems unharmed.
Sympathies! Water is nasty stuff.
A friend of mine had some success with a fan oven on low, but that would depend on how much stuff you have to dry out. The pictures are a real shame though, because they’ll stain. Some of the damage could be Photoshopped away, but that’s really tedious work – I had to fix a couple of damaged prints of my wife’s parents, and it took a couple of hours per.
Jane and I have been through 2 sets of family slides, hers and mine, and done that kind of restoration…hundreds of those blighters. Canon Photoshop has some good tools, but it’s not easy and it’s at least 50% artform.
If you need a full version of Photoshop I can get you up to 7 on a PC but no higher…
And if you need audio recordings transcribed or forensically managed let me know and I can see what my husband and I can do. I can’t promise it’ll be free because it’s his business, though recommendations and advice could certainly be. I know there’s a guy in Seattle who might be able to help you out and that’s much closer than we are. We also know a Real Forensic Expert (TM) in CA who is a good friend.
That’s very kind: we think we’re going to be ok now…thank goodness for the metal cans, the dehumidifier, and some damn dumb luck—the worst of the deluge hit things that we can treat without too much problem, and the emulsion stayed intact on all but 5 pictures, and four of those are not as critical and are considerably newer. Even better, we may have viable negatives: they’re drying now.
Yay! I’ve got a fairly priceless collection of my grandfather’s photos from China in around 1937 with soldiers everywhere. I suspect that many of them were Bought from local sellers since they seem very high quality (these blacks are BLACK…) and scenic in a way that says “professional” to me. Some, though, are clearly real Sailor Snapshots. I hate to think of anything happening to this.
Please scan them, tag them, and put them on Flickr. You can then save the digital files in the usual locations, too – that way, these pictures are a) standing a better chance of preservation, and b) other people get a chance of enjoying them.
Glad to hear that all is likely to end well. Distressing day, for sure
Quite a day, I’ll tell you. Thank goodness it wasn’t worse.
We did, however, get the Mantis taken apart and put back together with a new sparkplug, grease on the worm gear, and a new air filter.
Tomorrow is the acid test when we attempt to get it to start.
Digitize, digitize, digitize. No, it’s not as nice, but you don’t lose stuff if you keep backups. Sadly, my father stored his slides where it got way too hot, and they seem to be all destroyed. Navigational rallies in his ’55 T-Bird; sailing…all gone it seems.
Walt…that’s why I had them…to scan and transfer. It was my job (hangs head in shame) but there’s just been no time.
My job, too. Sigh.
I’d forgotten about that — we have 4 or 5 boxes of actual slides from family vacations beginning in the 60s. I suspect the slides are succumbing to old age, and I have no idea if the slide projector works any more, or even if my parents still have it. The projector was one where 20 or 25 slides fit in a straight tray, unlike today’s carousels, and you manually advanced the tray with a knob and pushed the slide into the projector with a sliding arm. At one point you could have it feed using a remote with a cable and a button, but even when I was little that didn’t work. I wonder how many of the slides are salvageable?
Very likely all. Get a scanner that works with slides…and best those that will work with several slides at a go. Get a copy of Photoshop that’s got the photo-recovery tools, like the speckle-removal tool, that will get dust out of the image. If you have a deteriorated spot in the image, then use Clone Brush (causes a tiny replication of the adjacent colors) to cover the spot. As for instance if you had a missing spot in a line of brush in the far background, you dip the Clone Brush in the grass, and duplicate that, then dip the tool in the shrubbery, and duplicate that. And even a fence post top if you need that. Clone Brush is a marvelous tool. You can also have an autocorrect that straightens up or intensifies faded colors. In such cases save one version of the slide ‘pre-correction’ and one after, so that as later technology comes along, somebody may improve on it. Get thee at it, and other generations will thank you. The people who took the shots with a buckboard and team in the picture or the Model T didn’t know they were exotic and wonderful: your vacation shots will take on that quality as time passes.
My heart goes out to you both; I hope you can control the damage.
I have inherited a lot of photographs; many of which I had no idea existed – the oldest, so far, from the 1870s(?) My aunt had a camera in the 1930s, so that’s when the pictures really took off, but they were a family that had photos done. My grandmother was less interested and less talented, but even so, I got a number of pictures of my Mum in her youth, my great-great uncle, and a very frustrating one that shows several men, one of whom is very likely my grandfather.
Future generations will curse digital photography because most people – myself included – do not tag digital files, so the problem of unsigned photographs will be much, much worse. At least most people keep films together; digital images are all over the place, and it’s not always clear which image is yours and which is downloaded.
Digital is good, but you are quite right: tagging those hundreds of photos is mandatory!