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How To Preserve This Page

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By SHARON TATE MOODY Tribune correspondent

Published: September 16, 2007

Your Aunt Mary, God rest her soul, was a prolific collector. Other family members shake their heads over how you saved her boxes of old newspaper clippings.

So here you sit, faced with all of her yellowing, disintegrating bits of paper. You know there are clippings of important family events, including births, marriages and deaths, but how do you preserve it?

Newsprint is the cheapest paper available and can deteriorate significantly within only a decade because of its high acid content. The acid is so powerful that it will spread to any other piece of paper it touches over a period of time.

For example, if you find a letter or a piece of stationery folded around a newspaper clipping, you probably will spot a brown stain outlining where the clipping rested.

Beat The Heat

To keep Aunt Mary's treasures from decaying further, you will need to limit their exposure to heat, humidity, light and handling. Hot attics and damp basements are poor places to store paper products.

Heat speeds chemical reaction and causes the paper to decay more quickly: The rate of deterioration doubles with every 10-degree increase in temperature. Humidity of more than 70 percent promotes mold, and light can cause ink to fade. And when paper ages and becomes brittle, it can tear easily when handled.

You should never laminate paper, but you can encapsulate it. A laminate is applied directly to paper. Encapsulated papers are placed between two sheets of inert plastic that are sealed at the edges without attaching them to the paper itself.

The best way to store newspaper clippings is to place each one between two blank sheets of high-quality, acid-free paper. Never fold the clippings - make sure each is stored flat.

Prior to storing the clippings, consider spraying them with an archival mist to extend the paper life. Magnesium oxide in this type of spray leaves an alkaline reserve to counteract acid in paper. The spray is available in varying sizes and prices from archival product companies.
Archival products are readily available online. Some of the most reputable ones include Archival Methods (archival methods.com), Universal Products (archivalsuppliers .com), the Hollinger Corp. (genealogicalstorageproducts .com) and Get Smart Products (pfile.com/index.html).

But what good are these clippings if you can't handle or enjoy reading them or share them with family and genealogy friends?

Before you treat and store the treasures, scan them into your computer. Then you easily can incorporate them into written reports, send them to others as e-mail attachments or print them out for research purposes. The originals will be kept safe for the next generation to treasure.

Citing Dates, Names

One of the things you might discover, as you read through Aunt Mary's collection, is that she never wrote the date or names of the newspapers on clippings. Even if this vital information is missing, you will need to know how to write citations if you use the clippings in genealogy reports.

Here's an example for our hypothetical inheritance of news clippings:

'Former Sea Port Mayor Passes,' undated clipping from unidentified newspaper, in family papers of Mary Porter of St. Simons, Georgia; inherited 2007 by her niece Elizabeth Porter Collins of Charleston, South Carolina.

You then can make a printout of the information, and put the page next to the original clipping before scanning it.
Aunt Mary may have captured some publication dates when an obituary ran at the top of a newspaper page or if she occasionally inscribed clippings with dates. And when you have a publication date, other important information can be found through the ease of the Internet.

Here's an example: The clipping is dated Feb.14, 1892, and the obituary says, 'Mr. Porter died at his residence on Wednesday.' From this, you can determine the date of death for Mr. Porter.

There are numerous perpetual calendar sites online, including timeanddate.com/ calendar. You can select any year and find the weekday for a particular date. Enter the year Mr. Porter died, 1892, and you'll see that Feb. 14 was on a Sunday. This means Mr. Porter died on Feb. 10, the previous Wednesday.

Practice these preservation lessons as you collect your materials. Don't leave it to your descendants to sort, organize and preserve your work.

Sharon Tate Moody is president of the Association of Professional Genealogists. Send genealogy questions and event announcements to her in care of BayLife, The Tampa Tribune, 200 S. Parker St., Tampa FL 33606, or

wmoody3@tampabay.rr.com. She regrets that she is unable to assist with personal research.

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