How much biographical research on your Founders?

[Cheerio]

Originally Posted by naraht

Just curious, for the founders of your fraternity/sorority, how much biographical information has been acquired by your fraternity/sorority for the widespread knowledge of the members.

For example, are the following included.
1) Their Religion
2) What companies they worked for during their lives
3) The name of their spouses (and with that whether they were married)
4) Birth location and date
5) Death location and date.
6) Burial location.
7) Education (including schools attended for Graduate work)

Just trying to figure out, how much is too much information to try to gather on the Alpha Phi Omega founders as we approach our 100th anniversary.

We have a founder that died in WWII, and we have conflicting information as to whether he died in North Africa, or during an evacuation to Britain. Sources differ by as much as two weeks...

Congratulations on your foresight to discover, and document, the history of the founding members of Alpha Phi Omega.

What type of questions about your founders, which seem to never have answers, are asked most frequently by your members? That may be where your first threads of inquiry begin, with what your membership desires to know.

The amount of information you choose to discover and disseminate also depends on the time you personally have to investigate, as well as the number of founders. Are you making this your full-time hobby for the next several years, or devoting only a few weekly hours to the task? Your answer will help you plan the number of questions you can logically manage to investigate.

ANY information you can gather will be of SOME use to your initiates.

When and how you present all, or some of, the information you gather to other members will be judiciously decided by you.

Our organization enjoys the good fortune of founders who began keeping a history from the start. It includes answers to all the questions you ask in your OP.

Some of our historical information is presented to new members before they initiate, some in appropriate training manuals for members. General info about our founders is shown on multiple public websites.

Over the years, we've published several history books which are made available for purchase by, and perusal of, all members. These volumes have also been given to some campus libraries where we have/desire to have chapters. Common sharing of history volumes among NPC/IFC groups upon publication is known.

The deepest information regarding our founders is archived at our headquarters, and members with questions have been known to get answers to tough and infrequently asked questions by contacting their office.