My Grandmother's High School Diploma

Several years ago, while visiting my mother, she asked me what we could do to get my grandmother's diploma scanned because it was very brittle. Mother and I started looking into it. It was going to be a specialty scan because it was 17 inches wide by 14 inches tall. I called the FOREVER Media Conversion Center in Green Bay, WI and she started looking locally.

I spoke with the manager at the Green Bay office and she suggested that I find a large format scanner and scan the diploma in several scans. She did not want me to send it in the normal way, through FedEx, because she was worried that during transport, the diploma would disintegrate due to the movement through the FedEx system. Mother and I talked about and and figured this was the best way to get the diploma restored. So the next time I was home, I got it from her and brought it home to get the process started. The following picture is what the original diploma looks like.

As you can see, time has taken a tole on my grandmother's diploma. The paper is very brittle and frail. Torn in many places and creases through words where you can barely read it. I was so excited to be able to get this restored. I went to our local library and they had a large format scanner. I got it scanned and added it to my FOREVER permanent online storage account. I contacted the FOREVER Media Conversion Center when I was ready to get it restored. They were able to go into my account and grab the images and stitch them together to get a beautifully restored document. I was even asked how I wanted to save the final image. Since I am eventually going to put this in a digital scrapbook telling the story of my grandmother, I asked them to save it in a perfectly square size so that I could easily import it to my album project. They saved it in a format that could be used in an 8 x 8, 10 x 10, or a 12 x 12 album. Here is what the final restoration looks like.....

When I was at FOREVER Live! in 2018, I got to meet the technician that restored the diploma and he said he had so much fun working on this project and was happy to be able to get it restored. He stated that when he was zooming in to match the detail, he realized that there was no font format out there that he could use because this diploma was hand written. He had to restore the lettering pixel by pixel. I think he did an awesome job and my family has this document permanently preserved in my FOREVER online storage account for generations to come!

If you have precious items that need to be restored, let me know, I can help you get started with the process.