Good evening,
I just wanted to take a minute and introduce myself. I am Chad Fred Bailey, the new JGS President for the term 2018-2020. I am not a new face to many of you or to the society. I have worked with the Society in many positions since I joined in 2010. First, as 1st Vice President and Project Coordinator, and then Treasurer and webmaster. This year, our society has changed as many of you know. Many of the tenured board members and officers have resigned or sought not to be re-elected. With new officers and directors and some in new positions. The board of directors are working to provide programming, events, projects, and resources to continue our mission and grow our society.
To complete this task, the board of directors met in a work session on Saturday, June 16th at the Allison Lodge at the Camp of Buffalo Mountain for a 4 hour work retreat. During this session, the board has proposed many new long and short term goals, ideas, and hopefully, resources, that will allow us to grow, engage, and preserve our society for years to come. As I hope you will notice, these three words will take on a whole new meaning within our society and hopefully, you will embrace them as well as our board tries to implement these goals, ideas, and resources. This process will probably not be immediate, but we hope to begin to orient our society back to our mission statement in our Constitution and By-Laws. You will begin to see this mission statement more and more and our focuses will begin to become more clearly aligned with it.
As we begin a new chapter of the society, the first work of business that I have asked board members to perform is to contact our members. I divided up our membership list and gave each of our directors a list they will be responsible for. In this effort, I encourage you as a member, to reach out to your director as they begin to contact you, either by phone, email, or mail. Tell them why you got into genealogy, what your ideas are, and how you want to help, or how we can help you.
In addition, I know you don’t like to hear this, but I must also remind you that dues were due on May 1st. Our society functions on these dues and as we transition to this new chapter, we need not only your support, but your financial contributions. So, please renew as soon as possible. Our Constitution and By-Laws allows a grace period, but on August 1, the membership list will be revised– meaning all members who have not paid their dues, will be removed.
Furthermore, I want to invite every member to attend our Genealogy Day next Saturday, June 23rd at 9:30 am at the Chuckey Depot Museum. I emailed out a press release last week, but if you did not receive it, please click the link below: https://jgstn.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/genealogy-day-visit-to-the-chuckey-depot-museum/.