Volunteers

I was particularly interested when I saw Patrick Daniel's blog Volunteer- what’s in a word? about the historical usage of the word volunteer. It seems that it had a purely military connotation until World War I, though it was also used in World War II, and he cites 3 cases from records from the Old Bailey in London, whereas the word volunteering has a more recent context, and has now partly been replaced by community service.

We've been very lucky with volunteers this year.

Our trustees (including me), all members of our managing Council, are all volunteers; as also are many of their wives, husbands and friends; we had a lot of extra and hard-working hands at the conference http://www.bordersfhs.org.uk/BFHSConference.asp we held in October to celebrate our Silver Jubilee, as well as a lot of people helping record gravestone inscriptions, drawing plans, photographing the stones, helping with transcribing poor law records, police records, and criminal records, checking transcriptions, researching and writing historical notes, we've had volunteers from iT4Communities http://www.it4communities.org.uk helping us with IT problems, and others helping at our meetings, our stand at events at the Hawick Heritage Hub,  and there are others, largely unsung, that help out when we need it.

Thanks very much to all of you.

If you haven't yet volunteered to help us, and want to, or you think there's another way in which we could use volunteers, or indeed, ways in which Borders Family History Society could provide a better or more comprehensive service, please let us know.