Dear Members,
Spring appears to have arrived finally and we now need to plan for this year's event. The week long scarecrow competition will be our (See the Scan) Summer event. This seems to have proved a great hit with the children and adults. Philip will be running this as he has in the past, he will also be holding a workshop on the same morning as the plant sale on the knoll (date to be announced).
On May Day morning, again on the Knoll, SHS will be running a stall with all our notelets and goodies that we have for sale, including the new "Thank You" notelets. After much phoning and searching we have been able to source cream envelopes, (in Newport Pagnell) so that we can produce cream notelets. These will be priced at £1-95 for four, after May Day they will go on sale in the village shop. Of course the sale on the Knoll will be subject to 'weather permitting'.
We have our visit to Emberton to look forward to on the 26th. I am not sure whether this newsletter will be published before or after the 26th April, but we are expecting around 10 members to be able to come to the Emberton sports pavilion. The Well & Towers are going to layout how they have organised their archives so far. The Ellis's have been collecting their historical documents for so many years and are now in the throws of putting it into some kind of order in their room in the Sports Pavilion. It will be very interesting to see how they are doing this. All of you please keep your eyes open to see if you can pick up any hints or tips that we can use in our filing systems.
We now have the Crump pictures from Valerie Bates (Nee West) safely digitised. Reproductions of which are in the Artists files ably looked after by Caroline. We have had a batch of pictures also from Gail, these done by her mother Helen Harrison, including some covers for Scan and something Helen specialised in, fashion drawings... ... ... . The artists files have now reached their third volume, who would have believed that this area of history would grow so rapidly and to such a size.. But then this is what has happened to all of our files and they still continue to grow at quite a rapid rate. The latest is a batch of photos from Fiona Jeeves covering some Beavers and Brownies activities.
The artist files are what we are to emphasise for September 30th, our Open Day. We do need to keep this in the back of our minds as these events have a nasty habit of rushing up at the last minute. We also need to formulate some sort of layout for the hall and to make it easy for our visitors to find their way around the exhibits.
We had a brilliant speaker for the 11th April meeting. Mrs Lesley Williams. Lesley is the Chairman of the North Bucks group of the Bucks Family History Society. She has also held most of the posts on the committee and has been researching her family for as long as she can remember and I have known her for many years. She is one of the leading authorities in the Bucks FHS, she spoke only very generally 'about research as we are not a specific family history group, but all of our members who were present thought she pitched the talk just about right for us. Lesley was able to answer a lot of specific questions from members and she did point out that the 'Internet' these days is a very powerful tool, but it had to be used in conjunction with the original information as mistakes were made in the transcriptions. The people who do the transcriptions are human too and can make mistakes. A list of web sites was given to the Society, these will be filed and will be available for members to investigate on their home PCs.
David Hyde, (parish council) passed on a book with many signatures inside. The book was instigated by Ian Thompson, chairman of the PC at the time the book was written. The book of signatures was to commemorate the planting of the copper beech tree in the recreation area. This was to commemorate the re-affirming of the vows of burying the hatchet by the Oxford and Cambrdge Universities in 1955. The book has committed the cardinal sin of not having been dated at the time of commemoration. But we can rectify this as there are many references to this event, including the national press... ..The tree has since died, but SHS have stated that they would be willing to replace this with a live tree.
A rough lump of what appears to be cast iron was brought along by Caroline, found while walking her dog in Bancroft field. All the members were perplexed by this, maybe the lump will find its way to MK Museum for a further investigation.
The next meeting will be a general meeting at 8pm in the village hall on 9th May
N.A.