THE ANDREW COOK GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY inc. #820632
46 King St, Tillsonburg ON CAN, N4G3E7
Ph. - 519-842-9433 or 842-9202 or 688-4534 CELL
Billboard 842-9202 - E-mail acgs@execulink.com - URL http://www.cookkk.com
wkg283AD Wednesday, May 4, 2005
Board Members, Coordinators & Family Rep’s
I bring you greetings from the HQ end of the society. My purpose in writing now is to bring you up-to-data with our (Fred & I) labours on behalf of your society and to present our view of the future - for your comments.
You will have received the May 2005 Newsletter by now (or it is enclosed for those who have no e-mail address). This coupled with previous communications will give you some idea of the progress with the society’s major approved project - publication of “THE COMPLETE ECHOES” vol 4 to 10. As you can see, we are well along the way to producing a super large clan history/genealogy with all of the most modern techniques available to us - something that can/will be easily and frequently amended and consequently kept current and interesting long into the future. So I believe we (collectively) are laying a firm foundation for the success of the society (acgs inc) and our descendants. WE ARE TRULY BUILDING A HUGE INUKSHUK for future generations to know,
“we - and our clan ancestors - were here.”
We (Fred & I, with a little help from our friends) can complete the work at this end for this project in a timely manner, however there are two areas where we need your (and every known cousin’s) help - if we have any hope of success.
a) PRE-PAID ORDERS
Based on the experience of publishing the first three vols of ECHOES,
in spite of our collective best efforts
- after 5 years pre-publishing and 15 years post-publishing publicity, we still have over 150 sets of vol 1&2 unsold and considerable debt remains
- also with over 5 yrs of soliciting orders for vol 4-10, there is a lot of interest
but not many pre-paid orders.
So if we are to achieve our mandatory goal of 200 pre-paid orders, before we publish (which has already been approved by the board), it can only be done with a full court press from every board member plus any other cousins we can motivate to help. After all, every one of us will benefit from the completion of this project — will you please help us in this way?
b) LATEST DATA SUBMISSIONS
These volumes will be more valuable to everyone, if we can include all cousin’s data
- some other family groups are collecting data on their own lines (outside those approved by the society as “Family Representatives”, according to our constitution). We can only applaud these works, however, considering the problems related above in publishing family data, probably little of these works will get to the clan members. If the good works of cousins do not get published, they are of little value - we need only look to the past - many (perhaps most) of the acgs archival library files now included in TCE had not seen the light of day, until we (acgs inc) came along..
Therefore we ask you to consider working with these groups (individuals) as a representative of the
society to encourage them to:-
- forward their work to us to be included in “THE COMPLETE ECHOES” - to the credit of the cousin who submitted it (as we have done for many others);
- consider forwarding family pictures, videos, audio tapes, biographies and family tales and any similar articles - they can all be converted to data-files and included in these works
- THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS WILL BE RETURNED TO THE OWNER.
We will make the connections to the clan members identified in the articles above.
Will you please assist us in these areas - PRE-PAID ORDERS and LATEST DATA SUBMISSIONS,
if you will we should have a reasonable probability of success - if not, we will probably fail. Thank you in advance for your help in this work. Your comments are welcome; We are pleased to continue as
Kathryn (Kathy) Cook 199 President
Fred Cook 198 Founding President
P.S. We need a picture (head & shoulders) of each executive member (all who receive this letter) for the Board & Executive Rooms in the village - see http://www.cookkk.com/village3.htm and http://www.cookkk.com/village4.htm we can size them to suit.
My Documents/Pres01-2005.wpd