The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 50 No.3 | Dec 2023

HGS News

allocated a specific Microsoft Licence and we can now share folders / files / documents amongst ourselves, or, we can send files to volunteers for updating or adding to and then, when they press ‘save’, the folder / file / document goes straight back into the HGS ‘virtual’ filing cabinet. The training of the ten postholders / Licence Holders was completed in late October / early November. We then moved on to address the need to review our business practices and to update them where it was felt necessary. I felt this was necessary because, back in the early Spring, when I became the de-facto Chairman pending my formal election at the June AGM, I attended a seminar run by our Auditors, Morris Crocker. Talking finance can be a rather dry affair but, during that afternoon, it was pointed out that HGS is, in fact, a business which has Charitable Status. Thinking it through, I realised that we are indeed a business being run for the benefit of our members – nearly 2,000 of us! Yes, HGS has a website and produces a quarterly Journal for our members and, yes, we are a regular presence on Facebook and Twitter / X and, yes, we have organised ourselves into local Groups around the County, plus the National and International Groups. This is all for the benefit of our members in Hampshire, for those around the rest of the UK and, yes, for those (hundreds of!) members

living elsewhere around the World. Until I became a Trustee and then Chairman of HGS, I thought that was all we did! However, we also make things and we sell things; HGS volunteers have designed and printed 115 different Hampshire Village Booklets that we sell; we have CDs and PDFs of Baptisms / Marriages / Burials and Monumental Inscriptions. We sell the “Godfrey Edition” of old Ordnance Survey Maps of the Cities and Towns in our County; we sell WEA books about various locales within the City of Portsmouth and we sell Eve McLoughlin books on various interesting aspects of Family History. We have a local customer base within Hampshire itself: our customer base extends to those who live beyond Hampshire’s borders and then beyond even our national borders to our members and others from around the world, so, it is clear that we are a business run for the mutual benefit of us all. A business run solely by volunteers also needs to be fit for purpose in the 21st Century. To this end, we are reviewing our business practices including, for example, whether we should provide our records in another format beside CDs, which new desktop PCs and Laptops are not equipped to run. Should we, for example, provide the Baptisms / Marriages / Burials and Monumental Inscription in PDF format and / or via a Memory Stick / Thumb Drive instead of CDs? This is just one aspect of our business that is

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