The Lost Archive

My Great-Great Auntie Enid Baker

Hello! Today I have a slight detour from my normal posts, no pictures of me but instead photographs of my family unearthed from the deep. Let me explain last weekend my family descended on Worcester to host a tea party for my Granddad's 80th birthday. We stayed for a few days and whilst there I decided to delve into his shed. It's a fairly terrifying place; there are thousands of spiders and moths and a strange dank smell that hangs over it all.

I had a very good reason to brave this all though, some years ago Granddad moved all the family photographs and papers in to this dank environment. Being the former archivist that I am, I was horrified when I discovered this recently, so the mission to save them began! I co-opted my Mum, Auntie and Cousin into the process, as I knew it would be a long one. What none of us really knew was how many delights would meet us when we prized open the boxes. My Great Auntie, Barbara (or Bar as she was known) was a librarian, we knew she had kept some pictures of the family but was unbeknown to us was that she had spent most of her life compiling an amazingly complete record of our entire family and its many fractions. Many of the pictures are labeled in her neat handwriting, and she spent much of her time writing to people to get photographs of distant relatives.  We found, alongside the enormous spiders, piles and piles of photographs dating right back to the 19th Century, correspondence from Great-Great Aunts, drawings from my Grandma's and Great-Auntie's childhood, receipts from the 1920s  etc etc! The sadness in it all was how many pictures had got wet and stuck together (luckily I've read up on how to save them!) and that many of the documents had seen better days. However, the great joy was finding photographs of people who we hadn't met but looked a bit like us. There is still an enormous quantity of things to sift through (and there are still things we've yet to save from the shed because we ran out of time). On their own, and out of context of the rest of the archive, these objects seem meaningless but altogether they build a wonderfully clear picture of a period of history and the people that inhabited it.

There are so many things to sort and arrange properly that I've decided to start The Museum of Family a project that will label and digitise the entire collection and offer tips to others looking to preserve their own family's history. Before moving to London I worked in a Museum/Archive so I've had to delve into plenty of jumbled boxes and try and make sense of seemingly inconsequently pieces of paper. I hope to build an exhibition out of it all: exploring the need to archive, the meaning of family and the hierarchy of objects.

These scanned images are just the very beginning, they are just a few of my favourites so far.  I haven't yet begun to scan the very old pictures yet but I will post some when I do. Then comes the mountain of correspondence (including beautiful 1920s & 30s Christmas cards), the photo albums (including one from a trip to India in the 1930s), developing negatives and miscellaneous bits left over!

I hope you enjoy this very small snippet. I hope that the project will make people think about the way we preserve history. It is so apparent to me sorting through all these photographs how important it is to PRINT photographs, to label them, to care for them and to celebrate them. Don't leave them festering away in a shed or in folders hidden in the depths of your computer; someone, by clicking the shutter, thought those moments were worth saving.

My Great-Great Grandma Elsie's (or Karnie as she was known) garden

My Mum (on Dobbin the horse), My Grandma Di, My Great-Great Grandma Elsie & My Great-Great Aunts Winnie & Enid

My Great-Great Grandma Elsie

My Great-Great Uncle Harvey Baker with some children from the school he taught at

My Great-Great-Auntie Enid, My Great-Great Uncle Leslie & My Great-Great Auntie Winnie

My Great-Great Auntie Enid at high school

My Great-Great Auntie Enid

My Great-Great Auntie Enid

My Auntie Bar, My Great-Great Grandpa Ted Ronchetti & My Granny Di

My Great-Great Grandfather Albert Baker & My Great-Great Grandma Mary (Elsie, Winnie & Enid's parents)

   

My Great-Great Aunt Winnie Baker

My Great Auntie Bar Ronchetti

My Great-Great-Great Grandma Elizabeth 

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