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II. Conserving the documents: a summary of the process [previous page]
In early 1999, the Virginia Historical Society's staff assumed that all 909 items in the collection would require preservation and/or conservation. After some analysis, it was determined that 85 percent of the documents needed immediate treatment. Among these were the earliest documents in the collection, and also those considered most valuable. For example, almost all documents written by or bearing endorsements of George or Martha Washington bore the mark of earlier, well-intentioned but now discredited conservation techniques. Over the years, conservators had employed a wide variety of conservation methods to the Custis papers. Nearly three quarters of the documents had been submitted to the Barrow lamination process, which primarily involved baking thin sheets of plastic onto fragile pieces of paper. Another one-fifth of the documents had been treated with a combination of Japanese tissue and a variety of other adhesives (a process extremely difficult to reverse without damaging the original document). The remaining papers had been "silked" (thin, transparent, finely meshed silk cloth applied to one or both sides of a piece of paper) and in some cases been coated with Japanese paper adhered with a virtually insoluable adhesive. The conservation portion of the project began in 2000 and took 17 months to complete. Early on, the VHS learned from our conservation vendor, the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass., that a fair number of the documents most recently treated with the Japanese paper and adhesive combinations had proven to be fully stable and in no need of conservation or restoration. Similarly, the NEDCC judgment that some items had simply been silked proved that their treatment could be undertaken by the VHS in its own conservation laboratory. Despite this relative good news, the bulk of the Custis papers would need to be treated to ensure their survival. From the beginning it was clear that it would be impossible to remove the extensive stains present throughout the collection—the result of exposure to moisture in the nineteenth century. Likewise, some documents had been damaged as the laminates that sealed them had degraded over time. Although the effects of this could not be reversed, the paper itself was stabilized from threats, both chemical and environmental. Conservation also halted the fading of inks, which had accelerated in recent years. The project included cleaning, de-acidifying, mending, and re-housing the documents in Mylar sleeves and acid-free containers. During conservation it was discovered that several seemingly individual pieces were in fact parts of larger documents [see example]. In at least a dozen cases these reunions were accomplished, allowing the true significance of the documents to be revealed. The Custis Family Papers are available to researchers on CDs and microfilm at the VHS. Although stabilized with the latest conservation procedures, the original documents are still enormously fragile and are not normally served to researchers. Conservation of the Custis Family Papers was funded by Save America's Treasures (administered by the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences) and the Elis Olsson Memorial Foundation of Virginia. [previous page]
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