Crossroads

At our September meeting, we were joined by two new members. Lois Mackin presented a slideshow highlighting our group’s history and future prospects. Here is a summary.

As our About Us page notes, we are an interest group of the Minnesota Genealogical Society. MGS bylaws provide that

Interest Group Organization. The Society may establish Interest Groups (IG) formed around nationality, ethnic identity, or research interests.
1. Creation and dissolution. The Society Board may create or dissolve an Interest Group by majority vote.
2. Status. An Interest Group is a legal sub-unit of the Society, and shall comply with all policies of the Society.
3. Operating procedures and requirements. An Interest Group must designate a member to serve as a liaison, chair or president. This person shall be responsible for compliance with Society Bylaws and policies.
4. Membership and dues. An Interest Group may not assess dues as a condition of membership — all Interest Group members shall be Society members.

The English-Welsh Interest Group was approved by the MGS board in early 2014. Since then, the group has met about eight times a year. You can find our summary information on the Branches/Affiliates page of the MGS website.

We have a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/mgsenglishwelsh/?ref=bookmarks. On the page we post information about our meetings, as well as links to our own blog posts and genealogy news relating to English and Welsh research. The page has two admins. Currently we have 51 Likes and 58 Follows.

We also maintain this website, with blog posts containing meeting notes and summaries of our programs. If you haven’t checked out our other pages (see the menu above), please do–we have pages for Meetings and Topics, Useful Websites, and About Us.

We maintain a gmail account for contact purposes–englandwales@gmail.com. This is monitored by Lois Mackin and Julia Mosman.

For the remainder of 2017, we had two activities scheduled:

• A table at the Hennepin County Library Family History Fair October 28 at Minneapolis Central Library.
• A meeting December 9 at MGS’ new location in Mendota Heights. The program planned was a webinar from The National Archives on working with old handwriting.

Since 2014, Julia Symons Mosman has acted as our group coordinator. Julia and Lois Mackin have maintained the website. Lois has maintained the Facebook page and ensured that our activities are included in the MGS monthly newsletter and website. Julia, Lois, and occasionally other group members have scheduled meeting locations and arranged programs.

Julia and Lois now need to step back from their previous level of support for our group. In order for the group to continue in 2018, we need a group of volunteers willing to

• Reserve meeting rooms, arrange for projectors if needed for programs
• Line up programs
• Maintain the group website–if you are able to log in and use a word processor, you can do this!
• Maintain the group Facebook page
• Write up items for the MGS newsletter
• Keep information up to date on the MGS website by coordinating with the MGS webmaster
• Show up early for meetings, set up and take down furniture if needed.

Some of these tasks require the volunteer to be at a meeting site when we get together, but others can be done from anywhere, at any time, and they can be shared. (For example, we could meet fewer times a year, and have one or more people plan, schedule, arrange publicity, and host each meeting. If you’re interested in continuing to have an English-Welsh research group, please consider stepping forward!

On Saturday, the group decided not to have the Family History Fair table in October, and to devote our December meeting to identifying the volunteers we need in order to continue as a group and, if we have the volunteers, to plan our activities for 2018. Please join us! I hope we will be able to continue–many hands make light work.