Travel Tuesday - Toting All Those Photos!

Well, between getting back into the grind from our vacation in Wales to see family, to still being on this crazy-energy whirlwind of re-organizing and cleaning out the house, I haven’t had much time for genealogy.  I had been pretty deep into helping hubby with the boatload of photos and documents he brought back from Wales.  We are now finished with this project.  Good thing, too, as we are on a deadline since we’ll be heading back soon, and will take them back with us. 

Not expecting that my mother-in-law would let about 100 years worth and 500 photos out of her possession, we were unprepared and had no idea we’d have such a blessing (read as: ton) of photos to tote back across the pond.  So what to do? 

Not to mention that along with the photos was a big Welsh bible from his grandmother’s aunt/cousin’s family, and decades worth of family documents of all shapes and sizes.  

As for the documents, a first-grader could have devised a better "folder" than hubby did.  But since he wanted no input or assistance from me on this, so I left him to his own devices. You can see his incredibly "secure" packaging below.  And prepared thus, we hoped for the best and headed home! 

  

Stacks of British birth, death, marriage
certificates and more.
Larger than legal size!

As you can imagine, the people at airport security were quite interested in all of this when it went through the scanner!  At three airports (Cardiff, Dublin and Boston), we had to take everything out of the carry-on for them to go through it. 

I have to give them their due, they were very polite, understanding of the delicacy of the documents, and gentle with everything, even offering to put the photos back into the tin.  In return, we politely declined and did it ourselves, to have it all in the right order.  One of the agents even wore white gloves, but that was probably to protect himself rather than our aging documents.  I would have loved to photo the process of them investigating everything, but I know they frown on that kind of thing. 

As a paper crafter and scrapbooking enthusiast, I know something about acid-free storage, and have appropriate containers for scrapbooks and other things I have crafted. However, this is A LOT of photos.  And I don’t want to be toting empty storage boxes back with me.  

So when we go back in a few weeks, hubby will instead be using a sturdy cardboard box that he uses to store computer peripherals.  It’s just a bit larger than his mom’s old cookie tin.  The box snaps shut, so even though it is not acid-free, it will be much easier to work with going through airport security.  And it's easy enough to get another here, so we can just leave it there, for perhaps the second round of photos to be transported!