How do I keep my manual reordering of photos when I duplicate albums?

Hello. I have a large batch of photos from a 12 day, family trip. Over 4000 pictures coming in from various relatives cameras, and my goal is to whittle this down and put together a nice slide show AND a cd that has the best pics in a chronological order (I want to make this as easy for Grandma to look at/download as possible). However, not everyone has correct 'time/date' settings, so Im spending a lot of time manually reordering. (because of the inconsistant source/time stamping, I cannot order these by 'name' or 'date'.

So, Ive sorted all photos into albums for each of the 12 days, and within each album I have two folders.

ex: FOLDER 1: ALL Wednesday Pics (653 photos), and FOLDER 2: Wednesday Best (52 photos).

Ive then gone into the 'Wednesday Best' folder and manually sorted the photos to make a more chronological order.

Ive repeated this for all 12 days. Ive got everything in the order I would like. Except they are in 12 separate little folders.

Where I get into trouble is I want to make one large 'master' slide show, but it seems every time I try duplicating/copying/moving a 'manually reordered' group of pictures, that order gets reset.

I want these pictures to remain in the order that I have spent hours and hours on. And I cant figure out how to do this. Can I lock them down or make sure this 'reordering' is set?

Any ideas?

thank you..!

erik