St Stephen's Church in Belle Vale Road will be open to the public on WEDNESDAY
8th FEBRUARY 2006, between 1 pm and 4 pm. As well as providing an opportunity to view the fine Victorian interior of the church (1874) and its stained-glass windows, this will also be a rare chance to inspect the Parish Records - e.g. of marriages and baptisms - before they are returned to secure storage. The books go back to 1893, when St Stephen's became a parish church in its own right rather than serving as a chapel-of-ease to All Saints Childwall, and should be of interest to anyone seeking to research their local family roots or local history.

For many years now - in fact ever since the Gateacre Society was founded in 1974 - we have relied on a team of volunteers to distribute Newsletters to our members. We are very grateful to everyone who has helped in this way, but - as announced at the AGM in October - we have in recent times found it more and more difficult to maintain this hand-delivery service and have therefore decided to dispatch all Newsletters by post. This will, of course, cost us more money, and the level of membership subscriptions will need to be reviewed - but for the time being we are using a proportion of our reserves to absorb the cost.
One suggestion made at the AGM was that members might like to receive their Newsletters by email instead of by post - which would provide them with a quicker service and also, of course, save us money.

IF YOU ARE A PAID-UP MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY and would like to opt for this method of dispatch, please let us know by sending us a message

Incidentally, we now have a new Membership Secretary Rosemary Doman having kindly volunteered to take over from Beryl Plent, who has served as our Membership Secretary for the past 17 years. Beryl is still a member of our Committee, but will be concentrating on Local History matters.