(StLGS president, Kay Weber, who will hand her gavel to Karen Goode on 1 January 2021, has written the first part of this week’s post. Kay has provided four years of excellent leadership to StLGS and has held us together with her calm efficiency and unfailing good humor through this most challenging of years. With Kay’s guidance, we have come out of the pandemic as strong and solid as we were when it started, and we owe her a huge debt of gratitude for steering us through this storm!)
Message From Kay Weber, StLGS Outgoing President
When I walked into our office in January of 2017, it was surreal! I was the president of the St. Louis Genealogical Society! Never in my wildest dreams had I thought that would happen, and it has been an eventful four years!
I was definitely out of my comfort zone, but slowly I got the hang of it. When something went wrong or the roof leaked, people came to me to make decisions about what to do. So I did what I thought was the most logical thing—I surrounded myself with the office volunteers who knew what to do and when to do it (and made sure buckets were handy!). During non-pandemic times, there are sometimes up to forty volunteers at our office who know what they are doing and are doing it very well. They are the backbone of the society. I now know the secret of being a president is to surround yourself with people who are great in what they do.
We have discussed so often during the last years how to bring our little star, the St. Louis Genealogical Society, to more people and show them what we have to offer them in their search for their ancestors. Of course, we really did not have a pandemic in mind, but it happened. So virtual reality came to us and we are embracing it. Our online meetings, conferences, and classes are drawing audiences from all over the United States and several other countries! (I am not in control of any of the virtual stuff, so it is safe and working correctly!)
One of our greatest achievements these last years has been our involvement with social media. Our membership has stayed steady when other societies are closing or consolidating. Besides our blog, we have a News and Events Facebook page, more than 3,200 members in our public FaceBook group, and more than 1,700 followers on Twitter. The volume of genealogy that is on social media is staggering, and it is available at 3 a.m. when we cannot sleep!
At this time, I want to thank each of you who has supported St. Louis Genealogical Society in any way, especially during the last four years. The society needs your support. Please continue to follow us and we will continue to work for you. We've loved engaging virtually this year with many of our members and friends who don't reside in our area. For those of you who do live nearby, when we reopen, come visit us. We would love to meet you and show you who we are!
Thank You for Your Donations!
As this stressful, off-kilter year finally winds its way to an end, we look back on what we have been able to accomplish as a society in spite of so much adversity. As Kay mentioned, this year for us has been one of making gallons of lemonade out of an abundance of lemons. The need to salvage a schedule when the world shut down due to the pandemic gave us the impetus to head to the internet and finally bring virtual meetings, classes, and special events to our members and friends. However, it also meant that our income for 2020, like many other non-profits, was greatly reduced.
But, StLGS is incredibly fortunate in having so many supporters and this is the time to say a heartfelt thank you to all of you who have pitched in to help. In November, we sent out our annual end-of-year donation letter to our members. We asked for whatever you could do to help. We also used our Facebook and Twitter platforms to ask friends of the society to remember us in their charitable planning, and you all came through with flying colors!
Thanks to the generosity of so many of you, StLGS has made it through this pandemic able to pay our expenses and continue to provide the same high level of service to those who look to us for help doing their family research. We have been able to maintain our website by upgrading software and security, create a Zoom account allowing us to host webinars and meetings for large groups, continue to scan and index congregation and funeral home records, and begin planning for some new projects once it is safe for all our volunteers to return to work.
As retiring president, Kay Weber, said in her “farewell,” thank you to all of you for your generosity. We appreciate every note you have sent and every dollar you have donated!
From all of us at StLGS to all of you, a belated Happy Chanukah and a very Merry Christmas!
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