This evening was significant since it was our first meeting in person as a branch since 2019 because of the Covid pandemic.
We started with our branch AGM which was a simple affair taking about half an hour. Anne Ashdown volunteered and was duly elected as our Maidstone representative on the KFHS Executive, a good solution as she already attends the Executive under her Kent FHS Archivists hat.
There was a discussion about the future of the Maidstone branch. We still have small meetings of about a dozen people but we hope this will increase with our future speakers. In October we have booked Guy Bartlett for his talk “The History of Aviation in Kent”. If you have an interest in Kent and/or Aviation, then come along and join us for the Maidstone meeting on the evening of 11th October.
Anne then led a discussion about future transcription work for the group. We are all keen to get back to churchyards to record monumental inscription in the summer months, especially if we can include tea/cakes or even a lunch into the process!
Finally since our March meeting had to be cancelled due to snow we continued with the topic planned for that evening which was sharing our family history stories under the title: ‘the moral of this story is …” A surprising number of members had prepared their stories. Plus there was an interesting article from the Lost Cousins newsletter which was shared and I expect more members will want to join the Lost Cousins mailing list as a result!