Best recommendation for repair of old photograph?

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Permalink Reply by Erin Bradford (freeaainnc) on August 30, 2009 at 9:18pm

Picture looks like it is of rail road workers, which if your great grandfather is one of these 5 men in the picture, this can be a great clue for you to find resources for him. But as far as conserving the picture goes, the best thing to do right now is to get an opaque paper enclosure (which I talk about on page 5). How big is the photograph?

Permalink Reply by Kathleen Fox Allen on August 30, 2009 at 10:20pm

My g-grandpa, James Farrell, was a locomotive engineer; his oldest son, James (my grandfather) was an electrician for the railroad, and several of his other sons worked for the railroad, too. According to the information that came with the picture, it is of the Lehigh Valley Railroad (PA). The family lived in Hazleton, Luzerne, PA.

The picture itself would be about 5.5"x6" if it were still square (or rectangular.:-)

Permalink Reply by Erin Bradford (freeaainnc) on August 30, 2009 at 11:38pm

Well, I've been spending the past 2 hours working on digitally restoring the picture (some of it can't be fixed), but looking at the torn corners of the picture, it looks like a card photograph and the dimensions you give me sound like it would be a cabinet card which were usually 4.5"x6" (although there were different types of card photographs, but I don't know the dimensions of those lesser known types) and for card photographs, those opaque enclosures/sleeves are the best type of storage sleeves to use. If this is a photo where you would want to take the original out of its enclosure to look at it (when the scanned image just isn't good enough and you just want to see the original) then you NEED to get a plastic sleeve to go over the photo and opaque sleeve to go over the plastic and do not remove from the plastic (as the plastic will protect it while you can still see it). At the very top of page 11 in the article are my recommendations for enclosures (or sleeves) and immediately under that are my recommendations for getting the correct size of sleeves, particularly if you mix plastic and paper sleeves. Hope this helps. It may be a while before I get the photo done, it's in bad shape and I can't repair the torn off corners, but I'll see what I can do.

Permalink Reply by Kathleen Fox Allen on August 31, 2009 at 10:16am

Thank you so much! I can't express how much I appreciate your effort.

I did read your article & I'll get the sleeves. I'll be returning all of the original photos to my mom's cousin, so I will get both the plastic and paper sleeves so that she can still look at the picture when she wants. Unfortunately, she had all of the pictures in one of those "magnetic" albums. The album was probably purchased and put together somewhere around the 1960's or 1970's, so the photos have become firmly stuck to the pages. I've been carefully detaching the pictures, but with that one, some of the thick card backing stayed stuck to the page, despite my best efforts. Thankfully, the picture itself was not affected.

Once again, I thank you for your help.

-Kathleen

Permalink Reply by Erin Bradford (freeaainnc) on September 2, 2009 at 5:13pm

Oh, those magnetic albums are the worst! I'm glad you were able to get them off!

Permalink Reply by Kathleen Fox Allen on September 2, 2009 at 9:42pm

Thanks - so am I.... although my icing spatula may never be the same again!