About
About Us
The Milestones project is conceived and presently financed by like-minded partners and supporters who share a belief in its Objectives
From family, friends and supporters we recruited a group to assist us. They helped to develop the ideas for services and to build up the Milestones Memories Register.
A small team of volunteers from the group, ‘moderators’ takes care of the daily business of the website. Mainly helping customers, where necessary, with the texts submitted in the registering and enhancing processes. Also, responding to contact forms and emails with general enquiries and comments.
We are keen to recruit new volunteers, particularly any with IT skills.
Moderators are known only by their initials or pen names. The present core are all retired.
Rogie, Team Leader, is a retired Scots lawyer.
Kelpie was PA to a charity chief
MMH, was an English teacher.
(The Profiles in Milestones Memories Register at launch have all been submitted by project partners, team members or supporters. Many are from their families, friends, colleagues. A number are of people they have admired and want to see remembered; one Profile is from a work of fiction. We are grateful to all who have helped to populate the Register, enabling visitors to the site to make an assessment its potential for them.)
The partners, and supporters have funded the setting up costs of the website and are meantime meeting its running costs. After launch we are confident that the site will become self-financing thanks to new users being willing to make donations towards the upkeep of the site or better by becoming sustainers. Find more detail in Funding the Project.
About Milestones
Milestones is all about memories. Memories recorded in our Memories Register. How do we go about recording them for posterity? You can do this by registering. You may care to go there first but if you do come back here for more information.
First, a word about our terminology.
Rather than ‘the deceased’ or ‘the loved one,’ we’ve chosen to use ‘the Subject’ to describe the person whose memory is registered.
You become our ‘Customer’ when you register a Brief Profile.
You provide most of what goes into the Brief Profile, mainly the ‘short life summary.’
We refer to anything published on the website as an ‘Entry.’
Adding more entries to the Brief Profile is ‘enhancing the profile’;
The sum total of the entries for a subject is their ‘Profile’ in the Milestones Memories Register –‘the Register.’
If you submit an Appreciation you will be a Contributor.
The UMR is the Unique Milestones Reference for your Subject
Milestones Objectives
To offer people the chance to place on record their memories of departed relatives and friends.
To provide a platform where the life of anybody from Scotland or with a Scottish connection, whether unassuming or prominent in their time, may be celebrated.
To build milestonesscotland.co.uk into an accepted, popular and reliable source of information for general, biographical and family research.
Milestones for Research
Milestones for Family Research
milestonesscotland.co.uk gives every family in Scotland, and beyond, the opportunity to place on permanent record their appreciation of a loved one. It enables the memory of a member of your family to be cherished, whatever their distinctiveness, no matter how long ago their death. Most family research is necessarily confined to searching records. Illuminating and fascinating as these may be, and while they can excite the imagination, they cannot paint a truly personal picture. Profiles in our Memories Register do just that.
- The short life summary in Brief Profiles capture their essence. Enhancing enlarges the canvas to the extent you choose.
- Eulogies convey the immediate sense of loss but can also provoke a quiet smile.
- Obituaries provide a more considered assessment, particularly useful to researchers if accompanied by a Timeline and photographs.
- Customising the Invitation and adjusting the text of the Postscript give you opportunities to attract interest from people and places of your choice.
- Appreciations can paint vivid pictures of loved ones in the words of those near and dear to them.
Do you have a family member who was ‘remarkable but unremarked’, or who, in the words of the poet ‘led a life unsung?’ Would you like to see their story online for succeeding generations? Yes? That’s what we’re here for.
To check if an ancestor or other member of your family is already in our Register, go to PROFILES.
Have you a forebear in mind, perhaps already researched by yourself or a family member, who you believe deserves a place in our Register? Yes, then welcome to Milestones.
More on Milestones for General Research
Whether you want to start your own piece of family history or take steps to see to it that someone you have admired, now scarcely remembered, is not neglected, Milestones is for you.
Those not related to a subject are equally as welcome as family members to become Milestones customers. We provide a platform where people, not related to their subject, can create a Profile for anybody from Scotland or with a Scottish connection.
Is there someone, perhaps from your own earlier years or longer ago, whom you admired, who was an influence in your life? Someone you got to know from contact or admired through reputation, prominent in their time, now at risk of drifting into obscurity? If you feel the memory of that person should not be lost, their reputation, achievements worth recalling and celebrating, then – Welcome to Milestones.
We believe that the site, well-managed and maintaining high standards, will provide a novel and compelling service for researchers.
In Protocols appended to our Terms and Conditions you will find provision we have made to deal with the situation where a member of your subject’s family makes contact with us and wishes to become our customer in your place.
The Profile Explained
All Profiles open with the Brief Profile created by us using the locations, the milestones, (of birth, marriage and death) and the short life summary received from you. An iconic photograph is welcome. We add the Invitation to submit appreciations.
Visit Registering to find out how to register the Brief Profile and the form.
This is what happens when your form reaches our registrations mailbox’
- A display in acknowledgement should appear on your screen;
- One of our moderators checks everything, adds the invitation, allocates the UMR;
- Assuming compliance with the protocol, publishes the Brief Profile in the website,
Most customers progress to enhancing the Brief Profile sooner rather than later, but when it is done is not important. The more entries the greater the impact, the more useful for future research.
We believe that it is through the display of accurate, considered, quality material in Profiles that we will build up Milestones’ reputation as a unique resource for family and general research in Scotland. For it is in their Profiles that loved ones are and remembered and appreciated whether they were larger than life or unassuming souls. There too the lives of forebears may be recorded and celebrated. And it is in their Profiles that those rightly held in high regard in their time but now feared forgotten may be called back to mind.
Invitations | Timelines
Invitations and Timelines enhance the value of our site for research
Invitations
The purpose of the Invitation is to encourage Appreciations from family, friends, colleagues and others.
Invitations may be standard, special or customised. We automatically add either the standard or special invitation to the information you provide in the registration form to create the Brief Profile. The customised invitation is adjusted on your enhancing it. See The Profile Explained.
The standard invitation, used when the brief profile is registered by a family member runs simply:
Appreciations are invited. They should be sent to: registrations@milestonesscotland.co.uk
The content of Appreciations is subject to the joint approval of Milestones and our customer. This right of editorial control will usually only be exercised when judged necessary for the protection of the good names of the subject and the site. A Moderator from the team may suggest it be used to edit for accuracy or brevity or to create a lighter while still respectful tone.
The longer special invitation, used where the customer initially registering with us is not related to their subject runs:
Appreciations are invited from family members and others, especially those who, like our customer, feel that this is a person who deserves to be remembered and celebrated.
They should be sent to: registrations@milestonesscotland.co.uk
We have made provision for the possibility of a family member wishing to take on ownership of the profile in a Protocol to our Terms and Conditions.
On a timeline and obituary being registered you may wish to adjust the given standard or special invitation. Our team will readily adjust the terms of a customised invitation with you, fine-tuning the original.
Why would you want to do this? Perhaps:
- to invite members of the extended family or a particular circle of friends to contribute their Appreciations,
- to encourage reminiscences from, for example, old school friends, former colleagues at work, friends made on holiday, or in pursuit of an inerest,
- to ask, for instance, that they should be celebratory, light in tone rather than sombre,
- to invite donations to a good cause championed by their subject.
The content of Appreciations is subject to the joint approval of Milestones and our customer. This right of editorial control will usually only be exercised when judged necessary for the protection of the good names of the subject and the site. A Moderator may suggest it be used to edit for accuracy or brevity or to create a lighter while still respectful tone.
Remember our team is there to help you at theteam@milestonesscotland.co.uk
Timelines
Timelines record key moments of a lifetime in chronological order, easing the flow of the following obituary.
They are a valuable element for research purposes for two reasons. They can suggest new lines of enquiry to the researcher, while events recalled there may prompt Appreciations.
To be of value in research, an entry in a timeline should be capable of verification in some form of public record.
Good examples of Timelines can be found in the Profiles of Mora Munro and Reginald Gilbertson
Funding the Project
Sustaining the Project
We have adopted the idea of Sustaining as our principal source of revenue. Sustainers make an annual payment of an amount of their choice to go towards the upkeep of the site
Most of our sustainers are customers who have completed the form at the end of the registration process. But anybody can become a sustainer.
If you approve of the site’s objectives and wish to see it succeed, perhaps so that you could use it yourself in the future, then your help would be welcome.
While there is no expectation of your becoming a sustainer on registering a Brief Profile the project will rely on Customers becoming sustainers when they have had support from a team member with an enhancement.
While ideally we want the project to be self-sustaining, we have approached a number of organisations to point out the potential value of Milestones to them. Responses have been lukewarm, understandably. As the site expands, however, we are confident that some will come to recognise what Milestones can offer to them, to their members, staff, shareholders. We are confident that the site, once established, will become attractive to a range of niche advertisers. Our policy will be to keep advertising discreet.
We will hope for and look to Patrons to fund improvements to our services suggested by them or customers.
Good Causes. Ever-optimistic we have made plans for the sharing of any profit in excess of running costs to be shared with Good Causes. See FAQs
If you wish to donate, you can do so through the following Bank account in use for Milestones Scotland Ltd: