ICGS Meeting Summary

April 16, 2003

Dawn Phelan’s home, Dodgeville, WI

Present: Kathy Stoltz, Sharon Stoltz, Peggy Perry, Mark Perry, Dawn Phelan, Cheryl Schmidt and all the little bunnies of the world

Secretary’s report was read and approved by Mark, 2^nd by Dawn

Treasurer’s report was read and approved by Dawn, 2^nd by Kathy

Projects:

• Library – new holdings arriving soon from libraries offering dupes for free in exchange for return postage
• Moscow book – nothing new
• Resource book – nothing new
• Funeral cards – nothing new
• Cemetery books – nothing new
• Probate records – Peggy has entered all of records turned in to date into a spreadsheet. The results found that we could not capture all of the information from the records for the index as we hoped. To get all the information to fit on a standard sized paper, landscaped, took more than 1 line of text. Additionally, we found that the “index” itself would only take about 10 pages of typed text. We determined that this amount of text was just not substantial enough to justify creating a booklet for. A new plan was discussed where we would include a table of contents for each record, the record itself (all before 1907 so no copyright issues exist), and then a full name index at the back of the book. This would generate about 300+ pages with all the information that we have completed to date. There are still a couple of files that Cheryl has that need indexing yet, but we don’t think that they are very large files. Additionally, we wondered about taking our list to the courthouse and comparing what old records we have with the old records that they have and getting copies of any records that we do not have. Might make this a volume set containing approximately 300 pages that gets us to the end of a calendar year. The next volume would start with the following year, etc. Peggy will contact Eileen Arndt to see if this is something that she would have time to work on. Dawn says she is swamped right now with a couple of large research requests that she is working on.

Other: Mark and Peggy have been working with the new version of the MS Money program and importing the data into a spreadsheet. Money has been giving bogus entries and therefore, inaccurate reporting and balances. Peggy created a checkbook register type of spreadsheet and has finished the importing and formatting. However, we don’t have a clear understanding of our exact account balances because some bank statements were misplaced in the transition of treasurers. Mark is working with our bank to request copies of the missing statements and then reconcile the accounts to give us a correct balance. He expects to have this completed by the May meeting date.

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