How to Archive Family Keepsakes Blog Book Tour: How to Preserve Vintage Cookbooks

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**Note from Gena:

I'm so happy to introduce this guest post from Denise Levenick, excerpted from her new book How to Archive Family Keepsakes. I feel strongly that in order to research female ancestors and preserve their stories we need to use the documents and heirlooms they left behind. Denise and I both have a passion for vintage cookbooks. An important aspect to documenting family history is preserving it for later generations. I know you will get some valuable tips in her guest post.

**Note from Denise:

Today’s Guest Post for the Blog Book Tour features an excerpt from my new book How to Archive Family Keepsakes on safely storing and organizing your vintage cookbook collection. Whether you have a single stained cookbook that once belonged to your grandmother, or bookshelves groaning with the weight of many volumes, I hope you will take the time to safely preserve your family keepsakes for the generations of cooks to come.

How to Preserve Vintage Cookbooks

Guest Post by Denise May Levenick, The Family Curator, 

author of How to Archive Family Keepsakes(Family Tree Books, 2012).

Most family collections include a few books-- high school and college yearbooks, favorite cookbooks, novels, or poetry volumes. Conservators recommend that stable bound books be stored upright on shelving unless they are rare or in poor condition when they should be stored flat and in protective archival boxes.

Before storing your family cookbooks, take time to carefully examine the volume for genealogical clues to your family history. You may find women’s maiden names, or clues to mothers, aunts and other elusive female relatives. Look through the book page by page for loose papers. Take note of favorite recipes, those with notes or tell-tale food stains!

Where to Store Old Cookbooks

For most of us, the best, and easiest place, to store family books is right in with our current volumes. Your bookcase is probably located in the temperate environment of your family room, living room, or den and relatively free from dust, insects, and extreme fluctuations in temperature or humidity.

If you decide to store vintage cookbooks in your kitchen, select a shelf where away from the cooking range where grease, heat, and dust can easily damage paper and bindings.

If you like to cook with your old cookbooks, consider covering the book with a protective book jacket, or using photocopies of favorite recipes. 

Catalog Your Cookbooks

Take time to write a brief history, or provenance, or your treasured cookbooks. Include the names (birth and death dates, and addresses if you know them) of previous owners. You could write the information in pencil on the flyleaf of your book, or on a piece of acid-free paper tucked inside the first pages.

If you have a large cookbook collection, you may want to catalog the books and include the ownership information in your inventory. Keep a copy in your archive or with your family history records so you remember what books you own and where they came from.

For help preserving old family recipe cards, see The Family Curator: 3 Recipes for Preserving Family Recipe Cards.

Organizing Options

1. Organize by subject.

2. Organize by owner or family if you are caring for the archives of several ancestors.

Storage Solutions

• Store printed books upright on home bookshelves or in your archival storage location.

• Store damaged or fragile books flat inside archival folders or closed boxes.

Cautions

• Remove bookmarks and pressed flowers from pages of books.

• Consider removing news clippings and replacing with photocopies on acid-free paper. The acid in newsprint can easily damage adjacent pages due from acid-migration.

• Take care when removing upright books from shelves. Do not pull the volume by the spine; instead push back on the volumes on either side and grasp the volume to remove.

• Avoid writing in rare or fragile books. Add identifying notes on a piece of archival paper inserted in the front of the book.

• Use a hose attachment to vacuum your bookshelves regularly to keep dust-free.

Tips

• Look for book and pamphlet storage options in archival catalogs.

• Protect the cover or dust jacket with clear archival plastic covers.

Resources for Archival Book Jackets:

Brodart <www.shopbrodart.com>

Gaylord Brothers <www.gaylord.com>

HollingerMetal Edge <www.hollingermetaledge.com>

from How to Archive Family Keepsakes: Learn How to Preserve Family Photos, Memorabilia & Genealogy Records by Denise May Levenick (Family Tree Books, 2012). Copyright, 2012, Denise May Levenick. All Rights Reserved. www.thefamilycurator.com.

How to Archive Family Keepsakes(Family Tree Books, 2012) ISBN 1440322236
Paperback / eBook Family Tree Books, Amazon.com, Scribd, iBooks, Barnes&Noble.com. 10% Savings Coupon ShopFamilyTree.

Join the Blog Tour

Join the Blog Book Tour for How to Archive Family Keepsakes January 10-26, 2013 for author interviews, book excerpts, giveaways, and more. Visit the Blog Book Tour Page at The Family Curator website for the complete schedule.

Proceeds from the sale of How to Archive Family Keepsakes during the Book Tour will help fund the 2013 Student Genealogy Grant founded in 2010 in honor of Denise’s mother, Suzanne Winsor Freeman.

Blog Book Tour Giveaways

Comment on daily Book Blog Tour Post
Tweet the Tour Twitter @FamilyCurator #keepsakebooktour
Share the Tour on FaceBook, Google+, Goodreads

It’s easy to enter to win a free copy of Denise’s new book or one of the weekly giveaway prizes. All you have to do is leave a comment to the Blog Tour Post hosted at one of the official tour blogs. Random winners will also be selected from social media comments on Twitter, FaceBook, and Google+.

Each blog tour post comment gives you one chance to win; one entry per post per day, please. Leave a comment at each stop on the blog tour and increase your chances of winning. The lucky names will be announced each Saturday during the tour at The Family Curator.

About the Author

In every family, someone ends up with “the stuff.” Denise May Levenick is a writer, researcher, and speaker with a passion for preserving and sharing family treasures of all kinds. She is the creator of the award-winning family history blog, The Family Curator www.TheFamilyCurator.com and author of the new book How to Archive Family Keepsakes: Learn How to Preserve Family Photos, Memorabilia and Genealogy Records, (Family Tree Books, 2012).

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Food.Family.Ephemera on Genealogy Gems

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of going to Lisa Louise Cooke's home, sitting with her, and talking about my new book From the Family Kitchen. We had a great afternoon and even spent some time using one of her grandmother's kitchen gadgets, the Toas-Tite. (I definitely need to purchase one of those. To learn more about it see the video mentioned below).

You can find that interview with Lisa on the Genealogy Gems podcast page. The interview is part of  Episode 137. If you scroll to the end of that podcast's blog page you will see a special offer for my book, good until the end of this month.

The videos for part of the interview and the cooking segment can be found on YouTube (shown below).

A special Thank You to Lisa for inviting me over and spotlighting my book. Lisa and I love some of the same things including quilts, vintage kitchen items and researching female ancestors. I had such a great time talking to Lisa and looking over her collections.

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New Jersey Community Cookbooks

Have a female ancestor from New Jersey?  There is a list of New Jersey community cookbooks on the Rutgers University Libraries website.  These cookbooks were written by women  from churches to membership organizations from 1900 to the present day.

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1913 Student Recipe Book from Brigham Young College

From Brigham Young College Recipes (1913) available from University of Utah.

While this cookbook is not a community cookbook,  it is a cookbook written by a Brigham Young College student and her instructor that includes contributions from other women. Recipes appear to be from instructors at the college and family members. The description for this cookbook, found through the Mountain West Digital Library, says, "Brigham Young College Cooking Recipes cook book, handwritten and compiled by Mary Carl [Carlisle] and instructor Phoebe Nebeker. Included in the cookbook are recipes for first and second year domestic arts students at Brigham Young College...."

This Brigham Young College Cooking Recipes cookbook is a handwritten  book with some damage.  The archive description indicates a date of about 1913 for this cookbook. However, one recipe found on page 53 shows a date of May 27 '12 . Though the recipes are from the early 1900s, there are many that we would be familiar with today including fondant, cheese fondue (page 21) and beef stew (page 31). Some recipes are probably more reflective of their historical era like the recipe for Rock Buns (page 38) which is some sort of biscuit with currants.

Looking for an idea for those Thanksgiving leftovers?  What about Potato Candy? Chocolate does make everything taste better...

From Brigham Young College Recipes (1913) available from University of Utah.

This is a great piece of food history that indicates just some of the recipes being used by domestic arts students at Brigham Young College in the early 1900s.

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The El Paso Cookbook

In many cases, community cookbooks are self published in small runs so that many are never archived. The total number of community cookbooks ever published will probably never be known.  But in a rare case, a cookbook may be reprinted and annotated for a modern audience.  Such is the case for the El Paso Cookbook, originally written to benefit the Ladies Axillary of the Y.M.C.A. in El Paso, Texas. This book is available to read at Google Books and available for sale at Amazon.

This cookbook provides a short history of charity cookbooks in Texas.  Edited by Andrew F. Smith, a Culinary Historian, he writes in the introduction, "The El Paso Cookbook is valuable from a historical standpoint-for what it tells us about El Paso and what it tells us about cookery at the beginning of the twentieth century."

This reprinting of an 1898 cookbook provides us with the names of 85 recipe contributors. According to Smith, women contributing recipes were local women, women whose husband's were stationed at Ft. Bliss, and women from other cities in Texas, Pennsylvania and Minnesota. In the case of women who were not living in El Paso, their city is listed next to their name just under the recipe title. Along with recipes, there are also advertisements for local businesses.

Looking for cemeteries in El Paso?  Well this cookbook includes a full page advertisement for Concordia Cemetery (page 65).  The ad states "This cemetery is situated upon high ground thirty feet above the river level. It has been greatly improved and beautified under the new management and no effort will be spared to add to its attractiveness. The Masonic and Odd Fellows' Societies, the Jewish and Catholic Churches and other organizations have their burial grounds immediately adjoining this cemetery."

One of the funnier ads found in this cookbook is for an insurance company which proclaims "Before trying the recipes in this book, have you lives (sic) insured with The Equitable Life Assurance Society." (page 98).

Those with ancestors in El Paso at the turn of the century might find the ads, and the names of the women contributors in this volume, of interest to your research.

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