We meet on the 4th Monday of the month, and in June that’s the 28th.  7pm in the lower level of Town Hall.

Our program will be a bit of a hybrid.  We’ll be showing a video of a program by Jack MacKeen on researching family history.    After this 30-minute video presentation, Dave Griffin and Leonard Palmer will demonstrate current computer tools and websites that you can use to research and document your family history on both PCs and Macs.

Please stay afterwards for friendly chit-chat and (perhaps*) light refreshments.

*Nobody signed up to provide snacks in June, so I’m deciding how nice I’m going to be…

We had our November meeting yesterday.  David Mark and Peg Brown teamed up to present the history of the Marble Farm and the families that called it home (Marble, Whitney, and Parmenter).

The Marble Farm is the oldest surviving house foundation in Maynard (the building burned to the ground in 1924).  Earlier this year an Eagle Scout project cleared the 85+ years of growth around the foundation making it once again visible to the public.  The Maynard Historical Commission is looking into grants that may allow us to do some archeological excavation of the foundation and grounds.

If I can get there before the snow falls, I’ll try to publish some photographs and perhaps a short video on the farm.

Our speaker for September was taken ill and so we hurriedly moved our October meeting to September (my thanks to Bill Duggan of the Maynard Police Department for being so accommodating).

On top of that, Maynard is holding a Special Town Meeting on our October date and so we decided to cancel the October meeting (rather than try to reschedule it).   So there is no Maynard Historical Society meeting on October 26th.  We encourage folks to attend Town Meeting instead.

Our November meeting is slated for the the 24th and we are looking forward to a program on the Marble Farm, presented by David Mark and Peg Brown.

A number of months ago, for one of our Society programs, I put together the “Maynard Picture Puzzle” program — a visual quiz on how well people observe details around Maynard.   Nearly all of the photographs are from within a half-mile of downtown and, much to my delight, I don’t think there’s a person who has managed to get all of them.

We were invited to give the Picture Puzzle to the senior citizens of Maynard yesterday and, not surprisingly, they did a very respectable job of figuring out the puzzle.  I think there was only one photo that stumped everyone!  (And, boy, were they surprised when they saw where it came from.)

The puzzles are photographs of familiar landmarks in Maynard, but only a portion of them.  From the detail you have to use the clues and your memory of Maynard to solve each puzzle.

I didn’t realize how many people were going to be at the gathering and didn’t have enough worksheets for everyone, but I hope those who joined us at the Elks yesterday enjoyed solving the puzzles as much as I did presenting them.

The Maynard Historical Society will be meeting on Monday, April 27th at 7pm.

The meeting will be held in the assembly room at POWDER MILL CIRCLE.  We’re staying here for a few more meetings as the Town Hall renovations continue.

There will be a short business meeting before the program.  Actually it is our Annual Meeting, which includes a secretary and treasurer’s report and election of trustees — but that doesn’t take too long.

As we do not have a meeting in May we are honoring Memorial Day with a DVD program “Navy Heroes of Normandy”.  Over 1000 American sailors were killed in the D-Day operations, but until 2008 there was no memorial to their sacrifice.  The program discusses the contributions of those sailors and the construction and dedication of a monument in their honor.

There is a Maynard connection to the program.  The Director of Photography for the program is Jim Karpeichik, who grew up in town and graduated from MHS in 1977..

Refreshments will be served. The meeting is open to the public.