I began trying to scan in the photos I had already.
A lot of these have been badly damaged by water and poor storage and by moving around from one state to another.
The negatives have moved both by post and by moving from house to house. These also were never stored properly.
The black and white ones especially are damaged not only by time but by dust and scratches and heat. Heat damages the color ones as well.
It would seem that you need a special scanner for negatives and I don't have one.
You can try scanning them on a regular scanner and then inverting the "color". The image you get when you are lucky or smart enough to get an image is usually blurry.
We have been trying this.
The following pages will show you the results. If nothing else it tells me which negatives I want to pay the big bucks to get worked on.
A lot of the negatives I have are not even people or they are images over the top of other images. I will have to look through the color ones by hand to see what I really don't want.
I really wish I had a light box so I could view them without handling them too much but I don't.