A few months after I showed some interest in family history, my dad took the old box of family memorabelia out of the guest room closet and handed it over to me. Aunt Alle had passed down to him all of the Ickes memorabelia that she had collected and preserved. Everything had been placed in a corrugated box with the four top box flaps covering the top but remaining unsecured.
Included in the box were old photos, newspaper clippings, letters, military insignia, and other odds and ends. There was also a file folder containing 30 of Adam's essays, poems and speeches. The pages of each writing were folded together lengthwise and most were secured with a paperclip. They were haphazardly gathered together in the file folder and stored in the corrugated box with everything else that was just kind of thrown in willy-nilly. Some of them were extremely hard to read and I could tell that unless something was done to improve the storage method soon and significantly, they weren't going to last much longer. It was a huge project!
First, I ordered lots and lots of these archival bags online in a variety of sizes so I could use them to store and organize everything from small photos to very large newspaper clippings.
Then I started scanning pages. Anything 8 1/5" x 11" or smaller I could scan at home. As soon as I finished scanning all of the pages of one of his writings, each individual page was sealed up in its own archival bag, never to be opened again. For paper sizes that were larger than my home scanner could handle, I put them in the archival sleeves first and scanned them on the giant scanner at Brent's office inside the sleeves. The scanned images inside the archival bags turned out just fine. To save time Brent scanned them grayscale. I would have preferred color, but, oh well.
Transcribing was by far the biggest job of all. If there was something I couldn't decipher, which happened all the time, I would email an image and location of the word or phrase in question to my friend Terri and she was almost always able to figure it out. I'd proofread and print and find more mistakes and print again. And even after posting these on this blog I've found even more errors. But I did the best I could.
To keep everything organized, I bought some large sheets of art paper and folded them into individual portfolios, each one containing the original archived pages of each writing and the accompanying printed transcription.
They were labeled with the name, date (if included), and the number of original pages and leaves.
And finally all 30 of Adam's essays, poems, and speeches were placed inside their own box for safe keeping.
"Little Things" is dated 1879 making it already 137 years old. As long as no one throws them away, here's hoping they last indefinitely.
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All original content, images, commentary, etc. copyright © by Joy Denison 2015-2016. All rights reserved. All writings, poems, speeches, essays, images, scans, likenesses, etc. by Adam Ickes (b 1845) as well as personal histories, images, and all other content by all persons referenced and discussed within the pages and posts in this blog may not be copied, shared, or reproduced in any way without expressed permission by the owner unless included here from other referenced sources or are historical records already considered to be in the public domain.
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