Old photographs, transparencies, etc

Back in the 1990's my father took photographs (slides 200+ I haven't counted) of the railways around Coventry. The slides go from Kenilworth to Nuneaton, Nuneaton to Rugby, Rugby to Berkswell and finally Berkswell to Kenilworth (disused section). He called this the Coventry Butterfly, I think he made that term up as I've never heard of it before. He also took pictures of the Coventry Loop trackbed/bridges etc., just as work was starting on turning it into a road. My father passed in 2019 and I now have all those slides, I haven't had time to do anything with them, I've no idea of the quality & they are in a mess and would need many hours sorting them. Any suggestions as to what I should do with them, other than throw them in the bin?

Would be a disaster to lose (or discard) them. For about £100, you could have them professionally converted to digital.

Some time ago I bought a useful gadget for about £30 and have put any interesting slides I had of family and such on the my computer. It is quite an interesting way of seeing what you have on your slides, but of course you need the time, it is a retirement job!

I have wondered about that myself Anne. Do slides deteriorate in storage?

The bin is definitely not an option! If you don't find any other way of dealing with these slides, then I'll have a go at scanning them for you - if you're not in a hurry. If you're prepared to wait a month or so, then I'm willing to put a few at a time onto my scanner and see what results can be achieved. To answer Dreamtime's question.... some slides do deteriorate a little over time. It probably depends on how they're stored - the temperature and amount of light, etc., but I have seen some old slides that have lost their sharpness and colour.

Thanks Rob, that's what I was concerned about. We have a box of frames from an old 'Viewfinder' that the family had many years ago and they look a bit 'iffy'.

Jo, the answer is to copy them ASAP but be careful that the digital copies don't become less secure than the original slides. In theory there are very expensive ways to make information secure for 100 years on a disk but since the technology isn't that old, who knows how long it will last and who would sue whom if they didn't? There is USB plug in kit that will scan standard slides and negatives. Not very cheap but probably cheaper than paying some company to do it for you, though they might put it on long term storage as part of the deal and may scan at a better quality than basic kit. Only you know how valuable they are to you. Giving copies to as many interested people you know is probably the best way to keep them safe. Labelled and described, of course. A shared family space on the internet? This is a problem for us all in the digital age. What to keep and how. It would be a pity if more was lost from this era than earlier ones because everything was in ephemeral forms and hidden or locked away from family in an unknown digital location.

I don't think the slides I copied had deteriorated. I did them about 15 years ago and many were of Janice as a bab, she will be 50 this year. Obviously the quality is not as good as photos of today, even ones taken on a phone. I didn't copy all, many were of views that I have no idea where they are. My brother has just borrowed my £30 scanner (it was either Lidl or Aldi) to do some pictures of his father-in-law and he said it copied perfectly.

Rob, I do have a slide scanner and quite an expensive one at that, I used to take slides myself in the 80's and they have all been scanned in along with my Dad's non-Coventry railway related slides. They have been kept in the dark in the attic for 20+ years along with my personal slides, which all came out surprising well, so I don't believe they have deteriorated much. My problem with quality is more to do with my Dad's photography. I loved him to bits, but he was more of a point and shooter. Having said that there is a marked improvement as the 90's wore on. My issue with doing them is more about what will I do with them? What use can I make of them? Shouldn't they be best kept by an organisation that would appreciate what they are? I was sort of hoping that a Coventry based railway enthusiast would jump to my rescue and take them off me, I'd then feel they were in safe hands. Somebody suggested contacting WarwickshireRailways.com, which I have done, I'm awaiting a reply. Thank you for the offer and anyone else who's replied to this post. Rob p.s. I should have said that all the slides are all annotated in pencil as to where they were shot and there are two ring binders accompanying them.

Here's an example of one of the scanned slides that did get scan in, I've posted it mainly to give you an idea of the quality. I've no idea where this is? Looks like an old platform, Daimler Halt maybe? p.s. The original scanned slide was 26mb, this has been cut down severely in order to post it on here.

A story not directly connected to the previous conversations on here, but I hope it's of interest, although it's non-Cov, and I hope Rob won't disapprove! It's a bit long! Back in 2007, my mother-in-law received notification of the death in Sussex of her 2nd cousin (a bachelor), and as his only known living relative, it would fall on her to deal with his funeral arrangements and everything else. Due to her declining health, it became our responsibility, but with the aid of some very helpful solicitors on the south coast, everything was successfully concluded. After the bequests had been dealt with, the question of house clearance arose, and as we'd dealt with him on family history research over the years, we requested that any papers, photographs, etc relating to the family came our way. In due course we collected a number of boxes from Sussex. Amongst the contents, we found a collection of photographs taken by his father as a young man when he travelled from his home in London in 1906, at the age of 18, to Alberta in Canada. Some photographs had brief details on the reverse, many didn't, and they laid untouched until early 2021, when I scanned a number and put them onto my Flickr site. [At this point, I should say that the deceased had left a large number of colour transparencies from his travels around the UK and Europe with his local rambling club, and at this same time, I decided to have a selection of them scanned professionally, along with some of mine from the 1960s-80s - altogether, about 2,100 slides were scanned for about £700]. There was minor interest in some of the Canadian scans, until September last year, when I was contacted by a professor from the University of Alberta, who had seen them on my Flickr site, and felt that they would be of interest to the local archives. After a series of emails, it was agreed that the archives would be offered the photographs as a donation, and as we really had no further use for them, we posted them to the professor. He immediately set about scanning them, with far better hardware, software and expertise than I possess, and the results were amazing. More amazing, however, was he was able to identify events, places and people in the photographs, which cemented his perception of the archives being interested. There was one group of photographs which I couldn't really get decent scans from, which he successfully managed, and these were his comments: "As you know, he took about 6 photos of indigenous ceremonies at a local agricultural fair (in Wetaskiwin, near Edmonton) in 1907. They show men and women dressed in traditional headgear and clothing. The women are dressed in beautiful "ribbon skirts" and in feathered headdresses, something I've never seen in pictures before. By chance, I noticed that the University of Alberta's Bruce Peel collection (which focuses on the history of Canada's prairie provinces - Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba) currently has an exhibit on "Ancestors", centered around historical photographs of indigenous people . There is a book that was just published to go with the exhibit, written by the exhibit's two curators (Sarah Carter, a Chair in History at the University, and Inez Lightning, an academic researcher who works and lives at the First Nation closest to Wetaskiwin). I've attached a picture of the book and have taken the liberty of sending a copy to your address in the UK. After going to the exhibit, I took the liberty of contacting Sarah Carter and Inez Lighting and included a scanned picture from the 1907 fair showing the women in their ribbon dresses. It is clear from the book that photos of women, and photos of indigenous people from that geographical area in central Alberta are quite rare. In fact, I think that his photos are better than the ones of indigenous ceremonies at settler fairs shown in the book. Sarah was quite excited about the photos and found the ribbon dresses amazing. By coincidence, Canada celebrated its first "Ribbon Skirt Day" yesterday, honouring the ribbon dress tradition of First Nations and Metis women." The donation forms are currently winging their way to Alberta, for the professor to forward to the archives with the original photographs. It's been a fascinating few weeks dealing with him as he clearly has a deep interest in and knowledge about that area of Canada and its history, and we are so pleased at the outcome. I'm now awaiting a stick containing his scans of all the photographs. I realise that these are photographs from well over a century ago, a far different age, but it does show that there's often a value in an image of any age which might not be apparent to the majority - there's always something that's not there now, someone who's no longer with us or who has grown from child to adult, all these kind of things. Without seeing the railway photographs that the o p mentioned, I'm sure there are plenty that will interest a lot of people. The bin is never an option! Thanks

Very interesting, MR.

I contacted 'www.warwickshirerailways.com' or at least I tried to, I'm not getting any response from email or facebook. Looks like no-one is actively working on the project at the moment, there's very little activity from about 2021 onwards, that's fine. So I've decided to scan the slides in myself, it'll be my next winter project. Once I see what's on them, I can better assess what to do with them.