The Great Family Reunion and Book Launch
Hi Everyone,
Welcome to the ‘post-launch’ edition of our webpage. Well, as many of you now know, we have released our wonderful family history and the launch of the twin-volume publication went off without a hitch. We have received some fabulous feedback on the books and are so pleased that family members are dipping into our past and enjoying what they read.
Our great Schmidt family reunion was a huge success with more than 300 people attending the two-day event. We had an opportunity to catch up with old friends and to make friends with some family members we had never met before. That’s what reunions are all about.
It was wonderful to see some of our senior generations attend the event and, of course, it made us immensely proud to have our dear Trevor Schmidt officially launch An Eye to the Sky.
We are now going to include on this webpage a selection of photographs which were taken at the event by Tony and Lensie Matthews. In coming weeks we hope to be able to include more photographs, so stay tuned to the page for lots of additional material in the near future.
Book sales were great; we have now sold more than half the print-run, but we continue to urge family members and friends to buy copies of our fabulous book. You have now all seen its excellent quality and detail, including all the great photographs, so consider buying a copy for your children or as a donation to your local library or museum. We have a long way to go before we sell all the copies but we hope that with your support we will do so as quickly as possible.
For those of you who are considering storing copies of the books to pass on to children or grandchildren
we recommend that you read the guidelines for book storage at the following
address: http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/explore/conservation-guides/packing-storing-books
It will provide you with hints to ensure that the books are stored as safely as possible. We have been told that in one instance some of the books may be stored for up to twenty years so it’s important that storage
facilities are optimised as well as possible.
Thanks again to all those who attended our history-making event. It really was a ‘once in a lifetime’ occasion and will never be repeated, at least not during our temporal-spans! Perhaps when the Schmidt family releases the next volume of our history in, say, 2112, our descendants will be able to look back on our lives and times through the words and images we have created. What a wonderful thing it will be for them to have our memories and the memories of those who came before us. History is a precious thing; if it is not captured it is lost forever. At least we now have the satisfaction of knowing that we have done
everything humanly possible to capture our history so that it may be enjoyed by all our future generations.
Thanks again and greetings to all our dear friends and family members.
Paul, Copland and Peter Schmidt