It has been quiet a while since we provided the members of
the New Brunswick Scottish-Cultural Association and our project supporters with
an update. As you know the project has
been going since February. As a
committee we have been meeting on monthly bases. However that scheduled has
changed with the summer months upon us. With this update we have some good news and
some bad news.
What I am going to do is start with the bad news and end
with the good news. This way this up date will end in a positive note.
The bad news is that we are away behind in our fundraising
for our goal of $20,000.00 in seed money and as a result the project is at risk
and is officially behind in schedule. We
needed this seed money to get this project going and to proceed with applying
for provincial and federal funding. In
June we issued our third email appeal and raised only $25.00 this is compared
to the other two appeals where we raised over $1000.00 on each. To date our total money raised is just shy of
$11.000.00. So as you can see we are still
along way off from reaching our goal of $20,000.00. The summer is never a good time to do
fundraising due to the summer vacations. However we expected to have our seed money in
place by May and federal and provincial funding in place no later than the
August. Neither has happened. So work on the project has been scaled back
until such time we do raise the much needed money. We can’t thank the people who have made a
donation to towards the project. We want
you to know without your help we would not have been able to accomplish what we
have to date. For those of you who have
not made a donation we wanted to let you know that we are not looking for huge
amounts of money. People can donate an amount
as small as $5.00, it all adds up. To
make a donation we have set up a special location on the NBSCA website that
help you to make a donation as easy as possible.
The good news our volunteers have started working on the
1851/1861 census and the information is starting to come in. We are very happy to say counties of Kent, Queens, Gloucester
and York are
just about completed and the data is in the process of being validated. We are
also happy to report that we have received permission from Lucille Campy to use
information from her book titled With Axe and Bible in our narrative of the
Scots who came to New Brunswick.
This will save us a lot of money and
time when it comes to that story. We
have also completed the budget for all three phases of the project and we will
be posting that budget on the Portal section
of the New Brunswick Scottish-Cultural Association site.
We also co-sponsored our first public talk on July 5th
in conjunction with the New Brunswick Provincial Archives. Dr. Elizabeth Ritchie from the University of
the Highland and Island,
Scotland spoke about her
research on Scottish Woman immigrates to Canada. We had over 50 people in attendance and from
all indication the talk was found to be very interesting and enjoyed by all.
In closing for this up date I would like to introduce you to
our official logo for the project. I would also like to appeal to all those
people who have not contributed to the project to please do so. This project is all about telling the story
about the Scots who came to the province and help shape New Brunswick to the province it is today.
Please visit the portal section on the NBSCA
site for more information. Until the
next time have a great summer and play safe.
