LETTERS
LOOKING FOR MARY I AM a former member of The Salvation Army, now a Catholic priest. I am trying to acquire a copy of Catherine BoothClibborn’s much-reprinted pre-war booklet Mary, The Mother Of Our Lord. I first read it many years ago and was impressed and encouraged by it. I have recently found it again. I now have a copy in French and there are many copies in English in various libraries, but I cannot find a copy for sale anywhere. Perhaps there is a reader out there who has a copy and would happily part with it? It would go to a kindly and appreciative home! In Christ, Rev Mgr David Silk Torquay [email address supplied]
LETTERS Many years ago General Frederick Coutts said letters in the Army’s press should be ‘carefully thought out and charitably expressed’. Letters may be edited and should ideally be no more than 300 words.
Catherine Booth-Clibborn
HELP WANTED: PUTTING ARMY HISTORY ON THE MAP I AM currently working on a project mapping Salvation Army data on the web. The idea is to create lots of different animated heat maps to show different characteristics of the Army around the world over a period of time, eg when The Salvation Army started in a specific country, the number of corps, officers, soldiers or schools there, etc. The simplest map already produced is when the Army started in each country around the world, as well as who the General was at the time. To see it, scan the first QR code using a smartphone. How can you help? To map other information over time, such as the number of corps or officers, we need the statistics for each territory and year
from Salvation Army yearbooks. However, the yearbook stats are not available anywhere in digital form, and yearbooks can be hard to get hold of (the further back in time you go, the harder they are to find). So far, we have manually entered the stats from about 30 yearbooks (mostly from about 1987) but there are over 100 years to cover, so there are plenty we do not have any data for. You can enter the data into our online spreadsheet, which is accessible by scanning the second QR code. If you have any yearbooks for periods that are not already featured in the heat map, and can enter some data for them, that would be very helpful. (It
takes about an hour to manually enter the data from one yearbook.) You can also visit the International Heritage Centre, which is happy to support this project and has a full collection of yearbooks. To see a sample of what we have done with the number of corps so far (it will look better when we have fewer gaps in our data), scan the third QR code. If you have any questions, or would like me to email you the links to the existing maps and spreadsheet, please contact me at email address supplied. Thanks for your help. David Philpot Brisbane
1. Global growth of The Salvation Army
2. Online spreadsheet of data
3. Number of Army corps worldwide Salvationist 11 January 2020
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