Tuesday, September 22, 2015

What about a Star-Spangled Banner Quilt?




Admittedly, we've been spending more time these past many months over on the Genea-Quilters Facebook Group, due to the ease of posting individual images of our quilting projects. Now we are considering a group effort to create a Star-Spangled Banner Quilt to support 1812 Preserve the Pensions. This massive digitization project is estimated to be about 65% complete as of this writing.

Our last quilt 1812 quilt project was devised using colors appropriate to the time period when the pensions were being award by the US federal government. Our quilt was a beauty as you can see from the image below!

At that time, the Federation of Genealogical Societies governed the collection of funds, and as they are quite busy, they were unable to promote our quilt on a weekly basis. Owing to a turn-over in book keeping practices, they haven't yet told us how much our quilt generated for the Preserve the Pensions Fund.



Our goal IF we undertake this newly proposed project is to keep fundraising and social media announcements in-house using our own talents and resources. This affords each quilter to show us pics of the inside of her sewing room, and tell us about her quilting journey as well as her ancestral quest.

Several Facebook group members mentioned they have discovered 1812 pension files in this emerging digital collection. By emerging, I mean, as each file is digitized and indexed by soldier's name, the file goes live on the free site at: https://fold3.com/title_761/war_of_1812_pension_files
Here annotations can be made by end-users like you and me, when we discover other names mentioned in a soldier's file such as his widow, comrades, superior officer and children's names.


What are your thought about such a project?

Click here to JOIN the Genea-Quilters Facebook Group.