Gathering materials
What to look for, where families usually find it, and how to get it to the studio safely.
This is the part families find hardest, and it is worth saying plainly: you do not have to have everything, and you do not have to have it organised. Gaps are normal. An archive built from six photographs and one good conversation is a better outcome than one delayed for two years waiting for a complete collection.
What to look for
Paper. Orders, evaluations, award citations, certificates, qualification letters, transfer documents, the DD-214. Anything with a date and a command on it helps place the story on a timeline.
Photographs. Not only the formal ones. Working photographs — in coveralls, in a space, mid-task, with the people they worked beside — carry more than a studio portrait does.
Letters. Letters home, letters from shipmates, anything written during rather than about.
Objects. Ball caps, plaques, coins, cruise books, patches, tools, the qualification pin. Objects are photographed and drawn rather than shipped, unless you want them scanned.
People. The names of two or three shipmates worth talking to. Often the most valuable thing on this list.
Where families usually find it
In roughly this order: a footlocker or storage bin, a filing cabinet or safe, a parent's or sibling's house, an old laptop or external drive, and a shoebox nobody has opened since the last move.
If the honoree is alive and involved, ask them where things are before you go looking. If they are not, ask their siblings before their children — the earlier career usually sits with the older generation.
Photographing documents and objects
A phone is fine. It is better than a flatbed scanner for objects and roughly equal for paper.
- Daylight near a window, never direct sun, never overhead kitchen light
- Camera flat above the document, not at an angle
- Fill the frame, but keep all four edges visible
- Turn the flash off
- One document per photograph, even when two fit
- For objects, take three: straight on, at an angle, and one close enough to show wear
Wear, creases and foxing are wanted. Do not clean anything up.
Sending originals
If something cannot be photographed well — an oversized certificate, a fragile letter, a cruise book — the studio will scan it for you.
Originals travel tracked and insured in both directions, and are returned before the archive is finished. Nothing irreplaceable is retained.
Do not mail anything without arranging it first. Materials arriving unannounced cannot be tracked against your commission.
Things you can add later
The archive is not finished at handover. Material that surfaces in year three — a box from an estate, a photograph a shipmate finds — is added under stewardship. Nothing is lost by not having it now.