Cleveland Family History Society
Cleveland Family History Society (CFHS) are one of my oldest clients and (shh! Don’t tell anyone else!) one of my favourites.
They are a community group based in, wait for it!, Cleveland, and they research and hold archives about families from Cleveland, North Yorkshire and South Durham. They have a worldwide membership of many thousands of people from all over the globe who are keen to take advantage of the huge archive that CFHS have built up over the years.
Their original site was built by an ex-colleague of mine who could no longer support them so he asked me to step in, which I was more than happy to do. That site has since been rebuilt, largely because we had to get rid of the online shop.
Their shop had thousands of products in it, mostly CDs with all sorts of archive and reference materials on them, and had been happily operating for many years, until one day PayPal decided that the account that CFHS had held with them for all those years was no longer valid because they couldn’t prove their identity.
This is something that’s happened to so many community groups and it makes me really angry. Basically, it’s to do with money laundering regulations which mean that all organisations need to prove that they have some sort of legal standing. That’s great for commercial organisations, CICs and charities, but not for community organisations as they have no way of proving that they are who they say they are. I understand the need for the regulations, but this crackdown has crippled many groups, forcing them to either incur significant cost by becoming charities, or shutting up shop all together. Surely there should be a better way?
So how did CFHS manage to survive? Luckily, there’s a large multivendor site called Genfair which sells products on behalf of genealogy groups. They charge a fee and in exchange they carry out all the financial transactions. So that’s what CFHS did – they switched to Genfair (you can see their Genfair shop here). It was a bit of a faff getting it all set up, but as it meant that CFHS have been able to continue doing what they love doing I think it’s been worth it.
Oh, and why are they my favourites? Just because they’re all lovely! All my customers are lovely, but CFHS have been lovely the longest so they win the prize.