2020 Meeting Minutes



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Rush County Genealogical Society Meeting Minutes
January 11, 2020

Carol Jones, president, called the January 11, 2020 Rush County Genealogical Society meeting to order.  The meeting was held in the Rushville Library meeting room with four in attendance.  
Katrina Cooper read the November 9, 2019 meeting minutes.  Marilyn Yager, treasurer reported our balance to be $4,038.66.  We have given a $150 donation to the Rushville Public Library as we have in past years and $136 for supplies to print a book that was ordered of Rush County Early Marriages – a spiral binding machine, paper and the binders. 
Susan Huston gave Carol all the RCGS materials she had, but Carol has not had a chance to look through it all.  
Carol reported that the Indiana Chapter of Palatines to America German Genealogy Society will be having their Spring meeting at the Liederdranz on Washington Street on March 14th.  The deadline to register is March 7 and it costs $25 for members and $35 for non-members.  Roger Minert, retired professor of family history from Brigham Young University.  He is working on church records state by state and is working on Ohio’s at present.  He has published three books:  Northwest Ohio Protestants, Toledo, Ohio Protestants and Northeast Ohio Protestants.  Minert is also offering classes on German Gothic script and writing on Friday, March 13th.  There are beginner and advanced classes.  These are at the Flanner and Buchanan Meeting Room on N. High School Road.  
We hope to have Denise Anderson-Decina to come for our March 14th meeting to give DNA 201 – what is the next steps type presentation.  
We discussed trying to have an evening meeting on a Tuesday or Thursday to broaden our attendees.  
Carol reported that the Library does have extenders for the Library when she spoke to them about us donating one.  The library board has purchased have four of them so they have 3 to rent out.  You would have to reserve them in advance.  Carol has reserved one for our February 8th meeting.  We should reserve them for the presentations we have penciled in for March 14, June 13, September 12 and November 14.
Talk turned to planning of the September 12th Workshop.  Should we charge for people to attend?   
10:00 – 1st hour – Presenters give overview of their presentation
11:00 – Denise Anderson-Decina – DNA, Charged $150 for last year’s program. Would she be able to set up personal consolations during the rest of the day?    
Where would we hold the Workshop?  -a church or the Elks?  Carol Jones will check on the Elks Ballroom as to the cost.  It can be divided into 3 sections.   Carol thought it might be about $250 – we could look at them providing lunch as well.  
What other presentations?
Professional Genealogist – Katrina has contacted.  He does 1-hour consultations for people interested in his services.  
Carol will check with the Indiana Palatines for class on German research.
Carol will contact Curt Witcher from the Allen County Genealogy Library to speak on what is available at the Ft. Wayne Library.
Marilyn Yager will check with the State Archives if they might be able to give a presentation.
Katrina will speak with the Indiana Genealogical Society to see if might get ideas for other speakers.   Karen Good has not responded to her request for November’s meeting so may have to fill that spot as well. 
A suggestion was made that we could perhaps have a Luncheon Topic/Open Discussion on Cemetery Restoration – are people interested in setting up a Cemetery Commission of sort – could invite Trustees to speak on what they do to preserve our cemeteries.
Our next meeting will be Saturday, February 8th with 10:00 business meeting and 10:30 Presentation by Carol Jones about tips in using Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker.
Katrina brought up a notice that we received through our email account about it being time to file tax paperwork.  It is not due until May and Marilyn will work with Ashley Stiers to submit this.
Bill Baetz reported that as for the website.  The service for this is good until January, 2021.  He will check on the domain to be sure if it expires February, 2020 or February, 2021 which is what he thinks it is good to.  
The website has been updated so we can have items that are able to be accessed by “members only”. 
Marilyn had made a suggestion previously about sending out a survey to members through Survey Monkey.  She will work out some questions we might send out to members.
Discussion turned to the Obituary Listings.  The files were originally in a certain kind of Data Base Manager and when we sent him additional ones in Excel format, he has to manually enter these and it is very time consuming.  He will look into updating how these are set up and what the cost would be for an Access subscription.   

Respectfully submitted,
Katrina Cole Cooper, Secretary
Rush County Genealogical Society
317-797-3338
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Rush County Genealogical Society Meeting Minutes
February 8, 2020
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Carol Jones, president called the February 8, 2020 Rush County Genealogical Society meeting to order.  The meeting was held in the Rushville Public Library meeting room with ten in attendance.
Katrina Cooper read the January 11, 2020 meeting minutes.  Marilyn Yager, treasurer, reported our balance on hand to be $3,973.12.  
Carol reported that the Palatines to America will hold their National Conference June 17-20-2020 in Cincinnati, Ohio.   There will be several speakers, one of which is Dr. Michael Lacopo who will also be a speaker at the Indiana Genealogical Society Annual Conference on April 18, 2020 which will be held at the Vigo County History Museum in Terre Haute.   It was decided to change our March meeting to March 21st due to the conflict with the Palatines to America Spring Meeting in Indianapolis on March 14th.  
Carol advised that Denise Anderson-Denica is not available in March to give a DNA presentation.  She is available on April 11th and still charges $150 to come.  We discussed whether the day before Easter would be a day people would have other activities and would not be willing to attend.  It was decided to go ahead with that date.  We already have the DNA kit to give away.  
Discussion turned to plans for the Workshop.  Denise advised Carol that she had already been contacted about doing a DNA class for Hancock County on September 12th.  Bob Surr is her contact there.  We need to look at October 17th as a possible date for our workshop.  We discussed what time to start and 9-3:00 was suggested.  Carol has not had any response from Allen County Library and has not been able to check with the Elks Club on dates and costs. Marilyn reported that she had contacted the State Archives and they do have program they give.   She also will be sending out a survey to people on our mailing list soon.  Katrina will send an email to let recipients know that they will be receiving it and we would appreciate their responses.  
Carol Jones gave an informative presentation on using Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker for our Genealogical research.

Respectfully submitted,
Katrina Cole Cooper, Secretary
Rush County Genealogical Society


Rush County Genealogical Society Meeting Minutes
March 21, 2020

Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic Stay at Home Order, the four officers of the Rush County Genealogical Society met on Saturday, March 21, 2020 via a conference call. The Minutes of the February 8, 2020 meeting were approved and Treasurer Marilyn Yager reported that we have $4, 052.43 in our bank account. 
Bill Baetz asked about the dues for member Bill Campbell.  He stated that Mr. Campbell will re-send his dues as we did not receive his check.
It was decided that it would be necessary to cancel the April 11th meeting.  We discussed using the Zoom Meeting for meetings should the meeting restrictions continue further.   The free meeting only lasts for 40 minutes and with a limit of 100 participants.  For a paid subscription that costs $14.99 the meeting can last 24 hours and goes up the cloud.  The officers will again meet Zoom on April 18th at 10:00 a.m.   Marilyn Yager and Carol Jones will practice using the program on April 11th in preparation for our meeting.  We hope to try it out as a meeting on May 9th with Carol doing her presentation on Tips for using Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker.   If this separation continues, we will need to contact future presenters to see if they would be willing to lead a meeting using Zoom.  The June 13th meeting with John Barr on Land records would be the next meeting that would be impacted.
Bill Baetz reported that the website plan and domain are all good through early 2021.  He has added in meeting minutes.  Discussion turned to our website and the plan to make a portion of the site to be password protected and for members only.  This would be an all or none situation.  Any page you make, you can create a password.  Bill noted most of our newsletters are not on our website.
Next, we discussed the results of the survey we sent to members through Survey Monkey.  We received 27 replies.  One of the comments was that members were confused on when enrollment fees were due.  We need to clarify they are to be paid October – December for the following year.  If unpaid by June of the next year, the member will no longer receive our newsletter.  One person commented that they joined and never heard from us.  They were wanting someone to work as a professional genealogist.
For 2020 we have received 25 membership fees.  In 2018 we had 35 members and 35 members in 2019.  
The reasons given for why they are a member of RCGS:  20 for RCGS is a local resource, 8 for Meeting topics, 8 for the comradery of RCGS, and 11 for RCGS offers general help for genealogy research.  
The question asking whether member was planning to attend meetings was 13 for Yes and 14 for No. 
Twelve people commented on the topic’s members would like to learn about or discuss at our meetings:  Military, Revolutionary Soldier Graves, Civil War, Photo Editing, Help with Brick Walls and Local Resources.
Some of the comments made were that we needed better marketing, that they appreciate our work, enjoy the newsletter, appreciation for the knowledge of the members, that we have few members, that some preferred a different Saturday than the second of the month and several prefer an evening meeting.  Several commented that they were interested in a workshop and would attend, some even would assist; however, concern was also noted for whether this would be too big of an undertaking when we have so few active members.  One person commented that fall was busy with sports activities.
Denise is not available for the September meeting.  She suggested someone else could give the presentation.   A different presentation she could give is How to Trace Markers through your DNA.  Carol will check with her for our October meeting.

For now, this is what our future meetings look like:
May – Carol – Tips on using Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker via Zoom
June – John Barr – Land records – Willing to use Zoom?
July – Regular meeting 
August – Field Trip to Ft. Wayne Library – depends on Corona Virus
September – Bob Suhr, Palatines Representative
October – Denise - DNA  
November – Regular meeting 
December – no meeting -as usual

Everyone was encouraged to use this time of social distancing to go out and take photos for Find A Grave.
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Respectfully submitted,
Katrina Cole Cooper, Secretary
Rush County Genealogical Society


Rush County Genealogical Society Meeting Minutes
April 18, 2020

Officers conducted a test Zoom meeting this morning, with all present except for Secretary Katrina Cole Cooper.
We discussed our near term meeting plans, and I think we agreed that, while Governor Holcomb may be close to relaxing the stay at home guidelines, May 9th is probably too early to try and hold an in person meeting. Therefore, we decided to further investigate using Zoom to conduct meetings in the near term, and that we would obtain a paid copy for that purpose. Marilyn Yager offered to obtain a copy of Zoom, either on a month to month basis, or whatever is the shortest duration offered. We tentatively scheduled a Zoom meeting for April 23rd at 1:00 PM to continue evaluation and experiment with screen sharing, with the near term goal of repeating Carol Jones’ genealogy tips presentation for our meeting in May.
Marilyn asked, and I described that I was prompted to install software upon trying to connect to the meeting via my web browser,  a bit of a disappointment as I was hoping that there was a standalone browser option for connecting to Zoom meetings. I did mention that the American Battlefield Trust has been holding Zoom meetings and making them available for non participatory viewing on Facebook. This method lessens the risk of exposure if the security concerns of Zoom are true, and Marilyn suggested that we could record and post Zoom meetings to our facebook page for the benefit of our out of town members.
There was a brief discussion of the dues check for my distant cousin Bill Campbell not yet having been received as of that last time the Post Office Box was checked. I don’t recall the details of our discussion as to when it had been checked last, but coincidentally, he posted to our Facebook page just this afternoon stating that his second check to us has not yet cleared. I replied to him that we are on lockdown here and would check again and let him know if it has been received.
We held some further review of our remaining meeting plans tor this year, and there was clarification that Denise Anderson-Decina of the Central Indiana DNA Interest Group is still available to present on DNA markers for our October meeting if we are able to host a meeting at that time. Carol verified as well that we still have a DNA test kit that we can offer as a prize for attending that meeting. Carol also indicated that John Barr is still available for June and Bob Suhr still available for September if those meetings can be held. I also have TBD presentation by Karen Good for November, is that still in the plans?
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I gave a brief update on the website that I will somewhat expand upon here. I received two audio files from Katrina recently on Carol’s tips presentation and the David and Ball Cemetery restoration, and I have uploaded those both to the website. They along with all the other presentation media are on the “What’s New” page. Eventually I will create a separate page for presentation media. I also updated a page for “Free Publications” to include linked files for all the Newsletters that I currently have, which I believe are all of them. That page needs more work, but all of the Newsletters are now available. It is password protected, and the password for that page is “Newsletter”. Please have a look and let me know if the password protection is working. Also, i thought there was some discussion that we would make a digital (pdf) file for the Civil War book available. Are we still considering that? Presently, the free publication page looks just like our sale publications page (because I copied that page), but I will fix that. I would just like to know if there is anything beyond the newsletters that we are wanting to make available to members.

Respectfully submitted,
Bill Baetz, acting Secretary
Rush County Genealogical Society


Rush County Genealogical Society Meeting Minutes
November 1, 2020

The Rush County Genealogical Society met via Zoom Meetings at 10 a.m. with ten joining the meeting.  Carol Jones called the meeting to order and began the meeting saying we would be having Election of Officers and that we would be discussing the future of the Society.   The current officers have been serving for several years now with little participation from the membership.  There is small attendance for meetings and the officers are wondering if their efforts are worth the work they are investing.  We have gained some attendance from out of town members with meeting on-line due to the Covid Virus, but there is no one moving towards leadership to replace those who have served for so long.  
It was decided that we will continue one more year, but will be holding quarterly meeting only to relieve the officers of some of their responsibilities.  
Discussion turned to what we can do to increase participation and leadership.  Jane Howard saluted the officers’ efforts saying she has been in our shoes as she is a member of 3-4 genealogy societies and the others are not as good as ours. 
Jane suggested we do personal outreach to our membership and remind them about meetings.  George Hibben added that he was surprised to hear that we had so few in leadership roles and that he could not tell this with the quality of meetings and newsletter.  He went on to say that many of the other Genealogy groups he is involved with just print lists in their newsletters where ours reflects actual family research.
We will need to see what happens with Covid as to whether we will continue our meetings in 2021 on Zoom Meetings.  We have about 18-20 local members and we send the meeting announcements to around 60 members.  We have been having 9-10 attend meetings via Zoom where we had only been having 4-5 at the physical meetings.  
It was mentioned that Fayette County Genealogical Society is struggling and Jane reported that Shelby County used to be active, but is not any longer.  A suggestion was made to contact the surrounding groups to see if they would be interested in joining with us for some sort of Tri-County group and we could rotate the meeting locations.  A comment was made that if we lay down the group, it would be hard to get membership back if there came renewed interest.
Jane Howard, George Hibben and Katrina Cooper all said they would be willing to contact members to encourage participation.  
We have no longer been mailing out Dues Notices, but do send them out with meeting notices.  There were about 35 local members in 2018-2019 with only about 18 in the year 2020.   
Katrina Cooper reported that she had attended an on-line class with King County, Washington’s Genealogy group and they had several special interest meetings at different times of the month - like DNA, Brick Walls, Family Tree Maker, etc and that they seemed to have a large membership.
Randi James commented that our letter detailing the state of the society had brought her back to the meeting today when she has not attended for quite a while.  She is willing to participate more and said she would consider taking over being Treasurer to replace Marilyn Yager who would like to be relieved of this position.  She will speak more with Marilyn as to what is involved with the position.
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Looking at our programs for 2021, we will meet the second Saturday of February, May, August and November.   July should be the Roots Convention in Indianapolis.  The following topics were suggested:

February:  Carol Jones, Presenter – how to use a Spreadsheet to Categorize our DNA results.  
May:  Richard Barr, Presenter  - How to use Probate Records ($75)
August:  How to make Reunion Books, Videos, etc
November: DNA 3.0 with Denise Anderson-Decina ($150) - or Cemetery Program with Jeannie Regan-Dinius from DNR

Another idea suggested were to be sure to get meeting notices in the newspapers.   The Rushville Republican has closed down gone into the Greensburg newspaper.  There is also a new paper out of Brookville.  Both Carol Jones and Joella Patterson volunteered to help proof-read the Newsletter as that seems to be a value to our members.   
John Wilson from Rush County Historical Society has reached out to Carol Jones about the Bicentennial which will be in 2022.  There will be meetings on this which she will attend.  
It was suggested that we offer help to people who need help finding their family.   We do have queries at times that come through Facebook and our email and Carol Jones and Katrina Cooper work to answer these.   It was decided to put a notice on our Facebook page offering free Genealogy Research and Randi James, George Hibben, Carol Jones and Katrina Cooper volunteered to work on any requests that come from that.  

Marilyn Yager, Treasurer reported that we have a balance of $4,787.63 in our Treasury.   Thanks was given to George Hibben for his generous donations to the Society.  Bill Baetz asked about membership check for Charles Campbell and Marilyn said that had gotten straightened out.  We are paying $14.99 per month for Zoom so she will cancel that until it is needed next year and it can be put in someone else’s name than hers.   
For election of officers, the roster of officers presented was:

President:  Carol Jones
Vice-President: Bill Baetz 
Treasurer:  Randi James 
Secretary: Katrina Cooper


Special thanks to Marilyn Yager for serving our group as Treasurer for the past years.   
Bill Baetz reported that our website and domain name will be renewing in 2021 automatically.  Even if the group folded, we would want to keep it for a time.
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Respectfully submitted,
Katrina Cole Cooper, Secretary
Rush County Genealogical Society


Challenge to our members:

• Submit your Membership fee – due November, 2020 for 2021.
• Attend as many meetings as possible in 2021 –Feb, May, Aug and Nov!
• What could you do to become more involved in meetings? – volunteer to lead a meeting or suggest a speaker that you have heard and found their presentation valuable
• Submit an article for the Newsletter
• Send encouragement or let your officers know what you appreciate.
• Consider what position of leadership you would be willing to volunteer for.