I have a box of hundreds of negatives from Grandma Kellogg. Grandma must have saved every negative the Kellogg family ever took; there are hundreds and hundreds, many are large roll film formats that are baseball card size cut into single images.
I have had them for ten or fifteen years now, wondering how I could bring them back to life in a cost effective way. Anyway I have found that simply holding the negatives by an end or edges, I could just hold them up to the sky and snap a picture of the negative with a Nikon D1x camera w/28-105mm lens set on macro in my other hand. I am ashamed to say that auto focus and exposure does the rest. I use Photoshop to make them a positive image again.