A Big Box of Stuff

I went to my mom's house this weekend and asked if she had the old box of stuff from Grandpa G that I seemed to remember she had.  She pointed me in the right direction, then took off, leaving my husband, my daughter and I to check out the box.  And my daughter is two years old, so that mostly consisted of us finding cool stuff (woah - look at these medals!) then quickly prying them out of her grasp or hiding the pretty shiny things from sight.

The box has pictures from the late 1800's and 1900's, letters from various relatives from the same time period, relics from World War II, and other odds and ends.  Some of it was so old I was too scared to really get into it until I was at my home with the scanner nearby, so I'm not even sure of what is there!

I decided to take the box back home to scan what I could, and started researching how to take care of these old things.  I’ve never tried to do any of this before, so it’s all new to me.  I called the Indiana University library in case they had someone who could help me scan.  They were incredibly nice and gave me some links to resources, but unless the documents are in their collection they don’t have the resources to work with them.  Because my relatives on that side are all from Illinois, the Indiana University library isn’t generally interested in our stuff. 

So I read up on how to scan and preserve precious documents, and started to dig in!