Mounted search and rescue

[Una Smith <una.smith@att.net>]

Marie Lester reminded me of Chuck Daniel, our Kokosing member who
died about this time last year.  I still miss him and think of him
each time I come across one of his insightful posts in our web
archive.  That archive is our collective institutional memory, and
I hope it will survive all of us.  You can help by supporting its
host website, ibiblio.org.  They would appreciate even a token $5;
many small donations help greatly to impress their major donors.
If you send them a check, please write "MSAR" in the note field.

Also, please think about the institutional memory of your own unit.
If the person who handles your website dies, what will you need to
do to keep the website out of limbo?  If your unit has a registered
domain name, do your unit records include information about how to
keep the domain name registered, so it is not put up for sale?  A
lot of small organizations get burned by that one, just by details
being forgotten each year as offices change hands.

Marie also asked about MSAR groups with "Patrol" rather than SAR in
their name.  Marie, those are not a new trend;  on the contrary the
groups with Patrol and Posse names tend to be older.  Many of them
were incorporated in the 1940's and 1950's.  What is happening now
is that these old groups are relatively slower than the newer ones
to get a web page.  They are well established in their communities,
so do not need the new-fangled Internet to help recruit new members
and market their services to their sheriff.  I know of still more
old MSAR units out there in the world, but not yet on the MSAR units
directory.  They are not listed because I need *something* to hook
the directory to, so it does not frustrate readers with excessive
dead ends.  It is a directory, after all.

        Una Smith
        New Mexico