1. Blair County Genealogical Society http://www.bcgslibrary.org/ library is closed during the month of December. 2010 memberships are being processed by the volunteer staff, however, so please be kind and join the organization to support its continuation. BCGS has added benefits to membership. You can read about them in the September 2009 president's message here - http://www.bcgslibrary.org/pres-message.html The membership form is here - http://www.bcgslibrary.org/member_app.pdf 2. Blair County Historical Society http://www.blairhistory.org/ will be closed from December 24 through January 5. 2010. Membership renewals are due, and membership revenue is very much needed as the state is not giving grant money to historical societies. Their membership form is here - http://www.blairhistory.org/membership/graphics/bchsmemberapp.pdf I got a note last week from Gary Burkett at the Somerset County Historical Society asking me to post a message to our mailing list about this, too. He said, "Because of Pennsylvania's massive budget cuts the PHMC (Pennsylvania History and Museum Commission) has reduced staff at ALL sites across the state. The Somerset Historical & Genealogical Center now only has a state paid maintenance employee. The Somerset County Historical Society has hired a couple of the employees full or part time to keep the center open. But, and this is the reason for my email, we have been forced to cut the hours the center is open to the public. With the Christmas holiday fast approaching I wanted to alert the Genealogy Community that the Center is only open Tuesday - Friday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM. There are NO weekend hours at this time. We plan to re-open on weekends in the spring." Blair County Historical Society operates all these sites - Baker Mansion, Royer Mansion, Dick Schoolhouse and Royer Mansion. Many of you are saying to yourself, "Why would I care?" but the fact is that because of the PHMC cuts, preservation of all PA county historical and genealogical societies has been jeopardized. BCHS is a county treasure-trove of bound newspapers, family bibles, photos, etc. What would happen if societies like these had to close their doors? The big genealogy subscription sites online certainly do not duplicate all the material they hold in their libraries. 3. I closed the Blair Photos group that had been migrated from MSN to Multiply when MSN discontinued all their groups. I found Multiply invasive (it's one of those social networking sites that wants to read your address book and upload the entire contents of your MyPictures folder). I started Blair Photos about 10 years ago as a sort of adjunct to BCGS, and on MSN, we had over 200 members, and over a hundred photo albums started and maintained by members. RootsWeb mailing lists are wonderful, but we can't attach photos or scans, or save them to the RootsWeb mailing list archives, so I started a Yahoo group for Blair County genealogy, similar to the one Ellis Michaels has for Clearfield. - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/clearfield-genealogy/ The url of the new Blair group is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blair-pa-genealogy/ I hope all our old Blair Photos members from MSN will join the new group, and please consider this an invitation to all to join. Yahoo is NOT invasive, I promise. 4. I want to take this opportunity to thank all the folks who've transcribed Blair County material and donated it for use by researchers via Blair Archives and this mailing list. You're the folks who help make "online research" possible. THANK YOU. Happy holidays, Judy