the family archive: how to save photos, letters and stories

Voronetki

An independent reference on family archives. It is not an archive, a genealogy service or a digitization service, sells nothing and is not affiliated with the former website on this domain.

Archive

Archive

This is where all the finished pages of the reference are collected, grouped by the year they were prepared. Each entry has a date and a main topic, and the filter above the list helps you keep only what you need right now. If you remember reading about envelopes for photos or about revision lists but forgot which page it was on, it's easy to find here. Within each year, entries run from newest to oldest, so the latest is always at the top, and older pages wait further down without going out of date.

A good inventory is half the archive. The rule works for a family box and for our reference alike: first the list, then the search.

— In the margin

How the archive works: a page appears here only once its text is finished and proofread. We give each entry a single main tag, which makes the filter easier to use and the results clearer. When an article is updated, its date in the list changes; we don't keep old versions. The tags match the topics of the reference: “photos” covers sorting, labeling and digitizing photographs; “documents” covers letters, certificates, envelopes and boxes; “memories” covers conversations with elders, recording and transcription; “genealogy” covers the family tree, lines of descent and old records. Click a tag to show only its entries, and the “All topics” button brings back the full list. Didn't find what you need? Check the feed of new articles or the collections, where pages are grouped not by date but by family occasion: a weekend with an album, sorting letters or a tree for a milestone birthday. By the way, it's convenient to keep an inventory of your own family box the same way: a date, a short title and one tag. That's enough to find the right envelope quickly even many years later, even if someone else sorted the box.

2026

  • Reference

    A family archive glossary: acid-free paper, backups, metadata, generations, the parish register.

  • Sections

    The four topics of the reference: photographs, documents and letters, elders' memories, and genealogy.

  • New

    The newest pages of the reference by date: what came out, which topic it belongs to and who it's for.

Sources

  • Voronetki reference materials

This information is current as of the date the page was prepared. Old photographs and papers vary a great deal, so handle fragile and especially valuable originals slowly and carefully, and when in doubt, it's better to leave them alone.