Fremantle
· archiving · family history · Cossack · ArchivesWiki · Wikimedia ·
This morning I've been working on another round of flattening HMW232, which is a box full of letters, receipts, telegrams, price lists, cheques, product samples, and other documents mostly dating from around the 1880s and '90s and accumulated by my great-great-grandfather Shakespeare Hall. He (and his brother at times?) ran a general store in Cossack (in Western Australia, not the historical Ukranian state), and much of these papers appear to be related to that. I'm not really sure, because at the moment I'm just focussing getting them cleaned, flattened, and stored before starting the scanning process.
My approach at the moment is to clean them of any loose dirt, unfold and flatten them, and add them to manila folders with one to three pages per folder. It seems to work best when there are fewer, so their folds don't interfere with each other. These manila folders are then stacked up in piles of about a dozen, between melamine chipboard boards, in a stack eight boards high. This seems to be about the sensible limit to weight, as well as my patience with this process. It means I do it for a few hours every few months.
After a few months, the papers are taken out, grouped by type, and stored permanently in those white archival folders (I guess we don't call them 'manila' because they're the wrong colour?) and kept in polyprop archive boxes. The scans go on Commons and the archival descriptions on ArchivesWiki.
