Family heritage and digitisation?

We all want to get to know our past. Preserving our historical values has become especially important by the 21st century. Not only at national but also at individual level. In more and more families, uncovering their own story and preserving their roots matters. Tracing ancestors and getting to know them through family materials has become a popular hobby for those interested in history. The sentimental value of photographs and negatives cannot be stressed enough. The significance of these period documents only increases if, besides the visual, they also contain a written record. Alongside private individuals, historical scholarship too has discovered family-history source groups for itself.

Just as a charter is digitised in order to get to know it better and to preserve it, the same can be said of archiving family materials. A 17th-century deed of donation can be taken “to pieces”, that is, the overwritten information and the scraped-out writing can be made visible on it, while so-called multispectral examinations make blurred handwriting legible on a photograph more than a hundred years old that was used as a postcard.

The First World War postcard shown here is private property, part of a family legacy. The postcard shows the owner’s great-grandfather, who came from Naszvad in Upper Hungary (Felvidék). The man, who served as a soldier in the First World War, was wounded in the fighting and in 1915 ended up in a military hospital in Budapest. From there he sent the postcard, in which he informs his relatives that he is well, lying wounded in hospital. During the First World War the use of picture postcards was especially important. It was the only way soldiers could send messages to their family members. The cards were also checked by the censors, since soldiers were not allowed to give secret information to a third party. During the First World War countless similar letters arrived from the front.

The former soldier passed on the events of the war to his children as adventures. This is almost all that remained after the veteran great-grandfather. For its present owner it was very important that experts digitise the family photo albums as soon as possible. Photographs a hundred or more than a hundred years old deteriorate extremely quickly, so digitising them as soon as possible is recommended.