#PreserveYourLegacy- Photo Captions

If you are like me, I often look back and old photographs and wonder – now, who was that in the red hat that I was talking to a 1999 Memorial Day picnic?! I suggest using a soft pencil and writing on the back of the old photos to capture that information.  For digital photos […]

#PreserveYourLegacy – Personal Archiving

What’s your story?  Take a moment to think about all the great and amazing things you have done in the last 5 years.  Now, in 20 years, will you remember what was the most significant event or achievement of 2015?  Where was it? When did it happen?  What was it? Why was it significant? How […]

Preservation Happens Every Day

When I think of #Preservation – I take an unconventional approach.  Did James Baldwin or Bessie Smith know they were making history when they got up every morning?  I doubt it, but what I do suspect is that they each had a healthy appreciation for recoding and preserving their observations. One of my favorite authors […]

Scrapbooks are History books

  In 1854 Frederick Douglass urged the readers of his newspaper to clip out an article called “Black Heroes”: “Colored men! Save this extract. Cut it out and put it in your Scrap-book.” The item told of armed African American soldiers in the Revolutionary War and listed the names of eighteenth-century “black men who had […]

Resources

Here are some resource as you build your personal or family archive Taking Care of your Personal Archive – The Atlantic Monthly Advice on Storing Digital Files  – American Library Association El Rescate de Colecciones Fotograficas / Spanish version of Salvaging Photographs Conservation Préventive du Patrimoine Documentaire / French version of Safeguarding our Documentary Heritage […]

100 Years and Counting!

This year is a milestone year for the US and the study of Black History – ASALH turns 100 and Dr. John Hope Franklin would have been 100 years old. When Carter G. Woodson and others set out to form an organization that would educate and inform the world about the achievements and impact of […]

Preserving #BlackLivesMatter

#BlackLivesMatter I have been following the outrage on social media, the mass media accounts and the artful inspirations that have come forth from the tragedies of the loss of Black Americans during police interactions. As a preservationist, I wonder how will we or our children be able to access this history. Most of it is […]