For the love of one-place studies

I’m about to jump on a plane, but before I do I have an announcement. Many of you will be aware that, as well as undertaking my one-place study for Wing, I maintained a separate website with an index of other one-place studies and similar sites plus resources to help one-place study researchers. While this was well-received there are limits to what a single person with limited time and money to devote to that project can achieve, so when I was approached with a suggestion that the time was right to expand beyond that I was pretty excited about what we, as a one-place study community, might be able to do under the auspices of a formal society. And lo, a Society for One-Place Studies has been born! If you have an interest in one-place studies please do visit the Society’s website at http://one-place-studies.org/ to learn more. The Society has been designed from the ground up to be an online international society, just like our community.

One thing that I had never really thought about much in my years of being a member of various family history societies was the charitable aspects of it. Pretty much all family and local history societies have charitable status, and this means that their reason for being is ultimately the contribution that history makes to civilization. While there are members, the main reason for being a member isn’t really what you get in return for your subscription fee, it’s you saying yes, education, preservation and promotion of historical information is important, has value in our society, and that you would like to support that by putting your money where your mouth is. Once we (I’m on the committee) know how many people are prepared to do that we’ll see exactly how big we can dream.

And now, I’m off to Wing! (and the rest of the UK). I hope to meet up with some of you on my travels.