Governor’s Message Winter 2012      Looking Backward, Looking Forward Your Board of Assistants recently conducted its annual retreat. At our retreats each year the Board of Assistants review how close we came last year to achieving last year’s goals. We also formulate new goals for the coming year. All in all upon review we did pretty well this past year. Here are the 2011 goals set by the Board at last year’s retreat: Establish a yearly calendar of events and meetings Change publication dates of our newsletter to more closely coincide with events Review and update our corporate bylaws Find a more accessible venue for semi-annual meetings Provide educational grants Improve use of our website at www.illinoismayflower.com To help keep better track of its yearly activities one of the first things the Board did this past year was to establish a calendar of events for the upcoming year. In itself this may seem like a relatively minor accomplishment but it is an important first step to better organizing and scheduling of events throughout the year. Closely related to establishing an annual calendar of events was the need to change the publication dates of our newsletter. We did this so as to be able to report on past events and activities closer to the time they occurred and alert members to upcoming events closer to the time they will take place in the future. In this issue of the newsletter you will find articles about the most recent General Society meeting in Plymouth in September, our annual state membership meeting in November and information on the scholarship award to be announced this next April. Our very capable newsletter editor, Luann Benoit, has been working very hard to provide a fresher look to the newsletter with less written text and more colorful pictures. We hope you enjoy the look of your newsletter. Your Board spent a good deal of time this past year reviewing and updating our corporate bylaws. Most of the revisions were made for the purpose of conforming our bylaws to our current practices. Other revisions were for the purpose of making our practices more efficient. All of the revisions are available for review by our state membership and will be submitted for approval of the entire membership at our next year’s spring meeting. See related article in this newsletter issue. Under the leadership of our new Education Chairman, William Conger, the Board has begun to award small grants to worthy organizations in the area. This past year we awarded a three-year grant to the Chicago Metro History Education Center which, among its many other activities, sponsors the Chicago History Fair competition. The last two meetings of the membership of the Illinois Mayflower Society which have been held in Naperville, Illinois have been quite well attended by our membership. Much of the credit goes to our Deputy Governor, Jane Schleinzer, who has sought to offer membership entertaining and informative programs at accessible venues and at reasonable prices. Our program this past spring featured songs of the Colonial era and our program in the fall offered a brief history of illumination and lamps. See related article in this newsletter about our annual meeting. If you have not checked out our website recently at www.illinoismayflower.com please do so. Our Captain and Webmaster Dorr Lewright has done a wonderful job of keeping the site current. It is chock-full of helpful information about our organization and its activities. When you measure us against the goals we set for ourselves this past year your Board of Assistants has met virtually every goal we set out to achieve. So, what’s in store for 2012? Our #1 goal for 2012 has to be to solve our record storage problem. Let me explain. As an organization and lineage society which has been in operation since 1897 it is not surprising that over the years our organization has accumulated a whole lot of paper, enough to fill several file cabinets. There are 115 years of minutes and correspondence, duplicate application forms, and a trove of supportive documentation. Finding adequate storage space for archived material has become a major problem, not only for us but for a number of other state Mayflower societies. Other state societies facing this same problem have opted to “go paperless.” It is time that we did the same. But first we will want to establish a protocol in line with national standards to determine which historical documents should be saved and which may safely be discarded. Those documents which should be saved will be scanned and catalogued on discs for more easy retrieval by historians and other researchers. Scanning and cataloguing all of our documents is big undertaking but it looks like this is as good a year as any to get started tackling this problem. We will keep you advised of our progress. Best regards to all in 2012, Max Max Douglas Brown Governor Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of Illinois
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