Customer Reviews

Organizing & Preserving Your Heirloom Documents

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I was hoping for a book which would give detailed instructions on how to preserve my old documents and photos. This book is more of how to write and publish a book using your old documents, diaries, photos, etc. I have no doubt that the author is brilliant, but this book did not cover what I needed to learn.

Organizing & Preserving Your Heirloom Documents by historian Katherine Scott Sturdevant is a thoroughly "user friendly" guide for the non-specialist general reader on safely organizing, collecting, and preserving the priceless personal and family papers that are so invaluable for genealogical research and the development of family histories. Readers will learn how to locate missing documents (even discover documents they didn't even know existed!); preserve and care for fragile, older papers; transcribe, annotate, proofread, and illustrate documents; conduct historical research; create new family history documents through writing and interviewing relatives; locate organizations that can help when working with family documents. Here also are guidelines for documentary editing and document publishing. Organizing & Preserving Your Heirloom Documents is an invaluable and highly recommended instructional guide for aspiring family historians as well as practicing genealogists.

The author is a history professor, historical editor, and the author of _Bringing Your Family History to Life through Social History_, and her background is obvious in the subjects this book covers: Locating and preserving family archival documents, organizing a documentary project, the professional fundamentals of transcribing, editing, and annotating documents, how to dispose of documents when your project is complete (stick them in a drawer or place them in a repository for the use of others?), and publishing the resulting book. The style is smooth and engrossing (more so, admittedly, if the reader is predisposed to reading archival materials), and the advice is generally pretty good. There are interesting digressions into such subjects as dealing with your ancestors' words on topics that we today would regard as socially offensive. As in most Betterway publications, tips, notes, reminders, and warnings are emphasized throughout, and a selection of useful forms is included. The bibliography is lengthy and detailed and there's also a useful list of organizations, specialty publishers, and suppliers of archival products. However, I could wish that the index were more analytical: "Archives and archivists" includes ten rather broad locators with no subheadings, which is not very friendly to the user.