Organizing & Preserving Your Heirloom Documents by Katherine Scott Sturdevant

Diaries, memoirs, letters, papers, and memorabilia from your relatives and ancestors provide you with the opportunity to be the keeper and teller of your family's life story.

Katherine Scott Sturdevant shows you how to safely organize, collect, and preserve these priceless papers. Getting started is easier than you think! Inside you'll find instructions, advice, and tips that teach you how to:

• Locate missing documents, or discover documents you didn't even know existed
• Organize your documents and the time you send on them
• Preserve and care for fragile, older papers
• Transcribe, annotate, proofread, and illustrate documents
• Conduct historical research
• Create new family history documents by writing and interviewing your relatives
• Find the organizations that can help you work with your documents

You'll also find guidelines for documentary editing--collecting, organizing, preserving, and publishing your family documents or the documents of others. Sturdevant takes you step-by-step through the process, start to finish.

This guide makes caring for your valuable family papers both a joy and an education.