Several
years ago something called the Scottish War Memorial Discussion Forum
was set up online. This was to allow anyone to share their photographs
and information about Scottish war memorials.
Over
time our little group of volunteers has turned the discussion forum
into a war memorial recording project, added another project recording war graves and dipped our toe into other work such as
publishing rolls of honour transcriptions and giving talks.
Recently
we’ve worked with Edinburgh University’s Edinburgh’s War project
and are partners in their new project - Scotland’s War 1914-1919 - which
has been set up to commemorate the First World War centenary.
A
couple of years ago we formed ourselves into an association called the
Scottish Military Research Group to manage all our activities.
Our
two databases are of national importance; no other organisation has
recorded so much information on so many of Scotland’s war memorials and
war graves and we need that data to be hosted on a more stable platform.
However stable platforms need to be paid for and we currently have no
money!
So,
at the end of last year we applied to the Office of the Scottish
Charity Regulator to become a charity, because with charitable status we
can apply for funding (and accept donations from anyone kind enough to
give us some money) to help us run the projects and achieve our goals.
Today
we reached another milestone in our little group’s own history when
OSCR accepted our submission and entered us onto the charity register as
Registered Scottish Charity, No. SC043826.
It’s
taken us a while to reach this point. We are a small team who manage
our projects, Blog, twitter account and Facebook page in the
precious spare time between work and family commitments so achieving
this status means a lot to us.
Thanks
to everyone who has supported us so far and we hope you’ll now see some
exciting developments from us in the next few months.
