15 Mar 2011 - Members' ramblings

This evening’s meeting was, of necessity, an improvised one as our Speaker, Mrs Sheena Andrew who was to have given us a presentation on “Old Ayr”, and had been struggling against the onslaught of illness, succumbed on arrival and had to return home.  We wish her a speedy recovery, and hope that she will pay us a second visit.

Our thanks go to Chairperson, Barbara Finlay for her adroit handling of the situation, to Bob Foulkes, who gave us a close-up account of the forthcoming 2011 census in which he is heavily involved, and to the three committee members who stepped into the breach, giving totally off-the-cuff short talks.

Librarian Peter Towle spoke of the rearrangement of the library, due primarily to lack of space in the cupboard.  A current list of our library books is now available to members, to encourage them to borrow. At the same time, some new books are being bought in the hope of boosting library usage. (See Book Reviews in the May journal.)  

Andrew Dinwoodie spoke of the research methods he used to respond to family history queries from both members and non-members. This introduced the use of the Scotland’s People website, with Graeme Savage explaining the steps to take to gain information.  Thanks to John Weston, the computer being used had live network access and had been set up on this occasion to project images on our normal screen so that people could see the results.  To make this type of instruction really effective, a larger screen would have to be used and it may be possible to do this at a later date.

Sheila Dinwoodie.