The Society is a small group in the grand scope of the United States yet the cost of maintaining this website, research, and entering data into electronic storage is several thousands of dollars every year. There is no permanent endowment, and every year the needed funds must be contributed.
What follows is the plan we have made for the wisest use of the funds we have.
Resources Plan for Site and Activities
Since the economic recessions, major contributors who previously volunteered time and money now must use their resources elsewhere. Therefore, from this point forward, the entire amount of any future contributions or volunteered time will be devoted, in the following order of precedence, to:
- Maintaining the present files (over 2,500 files!).
- Integrating the existing information (in whatever format or place it may be in our archives) into formats and placements where it may be more readily accessed by researchers.
- Keeping the main websites open and available, without any major additions.
- Securing accession of our various collections by museums that may be considered reliable depositories for many future years.
Completing the above four tasks will cost at least $3,600 a year in contributions income for each of the immediate next three years, an amount which is not expected to be fully achieved. If we receive donations that enable us to do more, we will.
We take pride in having produced results that have been, and will continue to be, significant contributions to: the American public, family history and social historians, and to American History historians.
Anything greater than the amount for maintenance and updating of this website on the internet goes to pay for hourly paid data input, typists, or research. You, and people like you, are what keep us able to make history available to you and future generations.
Donations in any amount for the work of the Joseph Bucklin Society are most gratefully received.
If you want to pay for one (1) hour of data entry time — we need about $22 to pay for an hour of electronic archives database entry time, which includes both the supervision and also the work by the experienced and trained persons we need for this sort of work. Keeping the historical facts and the database in proper genealogical format, with verified information is serious and professional work. It deserves, and gets, trained and careful attention.
Do you want to make a contribution for professional research on a specific person, or for reviewing, editing, and transcribing into electronic format some specific information we have received?
We thank those who have made extra donations for a particular effort.
Stacks of paper are not much use for historians until they have been transcribed and placed where they can be found electronically.
If you have a computer and the ability to type — Volunteer your time to type out what old records say. When they are typed they can be put by us into the website or the archives as electronically stored information for researchers or people like you.
We can send you, if you volunteer, some papers by post office mail. On your own schedule you transcribe what it says and send it back to us in electronic format (Word or WordPerfect or PDF format. Then we can add it to the electronic archives. To volunteer time please Contact Us
For example, we might (after phoning you) ask you to transcribe for historians a letter General George Washington wrote about Captain Joseph Bucklin in 1776. We can send you an electronic scan copy of a handwritten letter by General George Washington — for you to examine and type the text on your computer in readable form. (It requires patience and a magnifying glass. They wrote in a small hand in those days, to save paper, and abbreviations take some time to figure out.) Without you doing that, who will know what the General said about Captain Bucklin? Be the first person this century to know what General George Washington said in this letter about Captain Bucklin. (We do not think anyone else has been interested this century in looking at the original document in government records.)