The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 51 No.1 | June 2024

HGS News

place fifty years ago. Rather than take up more time and space in this Report, I would simply refer you to pages elsewhere in this Issue on which is reprinted an article from our December 2013 Issue, written by Murial Allen to mark the Society’s fortieth year – 2014. I have written a short ‘foreword’ to Muriel’s

article and I am very grateful to her for agreeing to it being reprinted in her name. In the meantime, with best wishes to you all for a glorious Summer, I shall write to you again in September. Tony Sinclair Chairman, HGS

News from the HGS Office

Our online shop continues to do well with 88 orders processed during the first three months of the year. Village booklets sent out by email in pdf format are our most popular item, but we still get a good number of orders for CDs and other items to be dispatched by post. Once again it has been necessary to increase our postal charges to bring them in line with recent Royal Mail increases. The HGS Help Desk in the Search Room is operating each Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. We also hope to be available for the Saturday opening of Hampshire Archives on 22nd June. Despite the Easter holiday period being quiet, we still receive a steady stream of research enquiries. Besides those from visitors to the Help Desk, our Research Manager Lorraine Whale reports that the research team received a total of 31 online research enquiries in the first three months of the year. In addition to this one enquiry came via Facebook, and three were from visitors to our stand at the Malvern Family History Show,

others came in by post. Still more enquiries came in via our presence at the East Surrey Online Show in January and the Berkshire Online Heritage Fair in February. If you would like to know more about the service we offer please see the HGS Research Centre page on our website. In my last report I expressed concern about whether we would have sufficient volunteers to keep our Help Desk running three days a week. Despite recruiting one new volunteer for the Help Desk and one volunteer for the project team this is still a matter of concern as three of our regular Help Desk volunteers will be leaving us in June. We will of course be taking holidays during the summer which will further deplete our pool of volunteers. Therefore, if anyone is interested in finding more about volunteering for HGS please contact office@hgs-online.org.uk or phone the office on 07769 405195 and ask for your enquiry to be directed to the Office Manager. Sue Stannard HGS Office Manager

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