HMC Family Association

As you know, we have been struggling for several years to move our communications into the 21st century.  We have been trying to establish a process by which everyone can share in capturing our family history.  We are asking you to now bring all of your histories, memories, information, questions, pictures, and anything else you can add to our cumulative documentation of where this family came from and how we got to where we are, to our HMC Family page on Facebook.com.  If you don’t do Facebook, email it to newsletter@hmcfamily.org and we will post it for you.

Remember to send your announcements of births, marriages, graduations, deaths, etc.  As always, please send stories of your ancestors and family members, anything that others will find helpful or interesting.  Or let us know if you have or are looking for information on our common past or genetics, or things like a recipe or an offspring of a favorite plant or fruit tree you remember from your childhood.

Finally, in this fast-paced age it has been very hard to find someone with the time to manage our website.  We are trying to split it up among more people.  John Carlisle in Nevada started and has been managing our Facebook page for several years.  He could use help authorizing family members to be able to access our Facebook page.  Barbara will attempt to keep the website going with the backup of her brother Bryan Kerr, who will extend the consultations he has already contributed to include her frequent calls for his expertise.  But we will need people to help with monitoring and postings, and writing on the website.

If you would like to join in this family effort, contact Barbara at newsletter@hmcfamily.org.

PRINT MAIL: Been noticing anything different in the newsletters lately?  To make better use of our volunteers’ time, we are trying out having our postal newsletter printed and mailed by Duncan Business Services in Loveland, Colorado.  Vicki Duncan is our registrar Sylvia Fiscus’s stepdaughter and she has been in business for ten years.  The cost of hiring Vicki’s business is greatly offset by the fact that she can meet the US Postal Service’s regulations, including the fee, for us to mail bulk mail and by her access to all forwarding addresses registered with the Post Office so we are not paying for undeliverable newsletters.  Plus, as more family members choose to receive the newsletter via the website, our print mailing list of over 500 addresses will decrease as will the costs.

It took us some time to make this transition, but now that we have, the process will go much faster and can be done by family members around the country.  Nancy Matheny Nasim, in California, is our print newsletter production editor and webmaster.  Barbara sends her the articles from Oregon, she puts them on the website and lays out the print newsletter and sends it off to Vicki in Colorado – all electronically.

Nancy has been working non-stop to set up the systems for both media.

If you are not getting your copy of the newsletter, contact registrar@hmcfamily.com with your name and address, to make sure that we are up to date.

WEBSITE We are now the first entry when you Google hmcfamily.org!

Remember, with a website you can email us links to sites of interest to the family and public notices and articles about family members.  We can also include a lot more pictures.  And information can be posted immediately.

Nancy is setting up the website pages so that they can have individual editors.  Royse Kerr, in Texas, who created our original Hewitt-Matheny-Cooper website, will be managing the Hewitt Page.  Nancy has started the Matheny Page, and a Cooper editor is needed.  Anyone interested?

With the many ways we will now be able to share and learn about family and our heritage between members across the country, comes the challenge of protecting personal information.  The council has developed a privacy policy that is posted on the website.  It will be a developing document.  If you have questions or concerns, please email Barbara at council@hmcfamily.org.

Finally, be sure to let us know if you want to receive the newsletter by postal mail, just email notices telling you when the website is updated, both, or neither (you can check the website without notices).