Congregational Library

Tours of the Congregational Library

Beginning May 28 and every other Thursday until September

Explore our historic Library with Claudette Newhall as she tells the story of the Library and provides visitors with an in-depth tour of the main Reading Room, the Pratt Room, as well as the ‘stacks.’ During the tour, you will also learn about the building’s history, our collections, and the services the Library provides.  

 

Begins at 1:30 p.m.   No charge. Reservations requested. 617-523-0470 x 1.

At long last! Records Management for Churches- templates available

I've been teaching a class to help churches deal with keeping and organizing their church records for several years now, but foolishly never came up with templates for a records management policy or a retention schedule. However, thanks to the power of the internet, I was able to find some very lovely documents from the Church of Christ and the United Methodists. Both gentleman I spoke to at the respective agencies were very happy to share their work with me. This is good because it really is all the same thing at a certain level and I hate having to reinvent the wheel. So, again: thank you!

Visit our Records Management Page to see our original Records Management pamphlet and the spiffy new templates.

Friday's Lunch: Cancelled

News Item: The follow up lunch for those who've taken the records management class is canceled for this Friday, 5/29 at the Salem Tabernacle Church.

Related ponderings on the cancellation: I started offering this event last year and had a lovely response for the first lunch, and since then folks just aren't signing up. There are a number of possibilities that I can think of for why this is:
- offered at the wrong time of the week and/or folks too busy
- financial
- unclear as to who should attend or why
- potential participants feel like they need to have made a specific amount of progress on their archive projects
- publicity not getting to target audience

When it's written out like that, it does seem like a minor miracle that I had anyone attend the first. If you would like to comment on this, please email me directly: Jessica Steytler

Results from the poll

I'm sure you're all very curious to know how the poll is going since we posted that almost a week ago. It turns out that 60% use Facebook, 40% use RSS, and only 20% go directly.

If you haven't filled out the poll yet, please do so- we'll check it a few more times in the next week and if the results are radically different later, we'll let you know.

The Congregational Festival 1854 : Celebrating the First Year of the Library

From the First Annual Report of the Directors of the Congregational Library Association, May 30, 1854:

On Wednesday, at 2 o'clock, P.M., the members of the Association, with their ladies, and other invited guests, sat down to a collation in Fanueuil Hall, which the Directors had prepared in compliance with a provision in the By-laws. Attendance was nearly eight hundred. The blessing was invoked by Rev. William Patton and at the end of the collation the assembly sang "Praise God from whom all blessings flow," under the direction of Lowell Mason, Esq. The speaking then commenced. Association President, Rev. William T. Dwight gave a short introductory address and was followed by short addresses given by Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, Hon. Charles T. Russell, Rev. E. N. Kirk, Hon. J. V. C. Smith, Rev. Edward Beecher, Rev. R. S. Storrs, Rev. Truman M. Post, Alpheus Hardy, Esq., Lowell Mason, Esq., Rev. Heman Humphrey, Governor Washburn, Julius A. Palmer, Esq., Rev. R. Anderson, Rev. A. L. Stone.

At precisely five o'clock, P.M., the President announced that the hour for closing these festivities had arrived. The venerable Rev. Lyman Beecher offered a closing prayer. This was the First Collation of the Congregational Library Association.

Collecting Statistics

If our lovely viewing audience would be so kind as to follow this link to a survey that will tell us how you get to these posts, as we suspect it's not just in the traditional via Typepad's URL. We will be using the results at our annual meeting in a few weeks.
Thanks-   Click Here to take survey

Treasures of the Congregational Library : The Eliot Bible

The first Bible printed in America is a translation of the Old and New Testaments into the Algonquin language by John Eliot (1604-1690), “Apostle to the Indians.”  Rev. Eliot worked on his translation for over 10 years before the New Testament portion was issued from the press of Samuel Green, Cambridge, Mass.  in 1661. This translation was of a language without a written tradition. The printing of the Old Testament took three years, and was finished in 1663. To make a complete Bible, it was bound up with the New Testament and the Psalms of David (the latter in verse form, translated from the English of the New England psalm book). A thousand copies were printed. Because many copies were destroyed in the wars of the 1670s, a new edition of the New Testament was printed in 1680 and a new Old Testament in 1685. Two thousand copies of the latter were printed. Eliot published his Indian Grammar in 1666.

John Eliot was pastor in Roxbury for 58 Years. Eliot was one of a few ministers who served as a missionary to American Indians in New England, and he organized several "praying towns"—communities of converted Indians—in Massachusetts including one in Natick.   Eliot was one of the few early settlers to believe that Indians had souls. He preached his first sermon in the Algonguin language in 1646 at Nonantum, now Newton.

The Eliot Bible appeared some 120 years before the first complete English edition of the Bible was published in what is now the United States.

Eliot is also credited with being one of the editors of the Bay Psalm Book and a supporter of the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (the first Protestant Missionary Society) -- created to convert the New England Indians.

In 1961, the ACA sent the Eliot Bible to England. The Bible was defective, lacking pages at the beginning and end.  A facsimile title page, the first two pages of Genesis and two pages in between the testaments were printed and the book bound in antique leather.

New guides for archive collections available

Thanks to the fantastic work of this semester's interns, plus my own diligence, our web site and online catalog has a number of newly organized collections. The following descriptions are pulled from the finding aids.

Hopkinton, New Hampshire- First Church. Records, 1757-1909. The archive assisted the Hopkinton church get these records microfilmed over the past many months; this collection is in microfilm form. The church maintains the original ledgers. Within the four volumes, there are records for membership (including admission/dismission), baptisms, deaths, marriages, meetings; the final volume includes the lists of ministers and deacons.

Charles Addison Richardson. Correspondence, 1794, 1798, 1848-1872. This collection is part of the Small Collections, which don't normally have guides of their own, however this Congregationalist editor's papers are a collection of letters; the guide is an index of who the correspondence is from.

Wendell, Massachusetts. Congregational Church. Records, 1783-1953. Last fall's intern, Kim Kinder organized these papers. Even though the church was relatively small throughout its life, it contributed to foreign missions as well as domestic, assisting in the mission work in China. The church belonged to the Franklin Association of Congregational Churches and worked closely with the Massachusetts Home Missionary Society to call and fund its ministers.

Intern Colleen Mahoney's contributions:
Henry Boynton Papers, 1824-1866. The Rev.Boynton served in Vermont, New York New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.  He was a member of the Anti-Slavery Society, and gave sermons on their behalf.
This collection includes 100 hand-written sermons and documents composed by Boynton between 1824 and 1858.  Sermon topics include: slavery, prejudice, temperance, and missionary work.  This collection also includes Boynton’s ledger book of marriage records, which includes records of weddings he performed between 1832 and 1866. 
This collection came from the estate of Miss Ada Y. Harris of Bridgewater, New York, a descendant of Dr. William Yeats of Butternuts (Morris), New York.  It was purchased by the Congregational Library in October 2008.
General Conference of the German Evangelical Congregational Churches of the United States. Records, 1883-1971. The General Conference of the German Evangelical Congregational Churches of the United States of America was founded in Crete, Nebraska in 1883, with the goal of improving communication and collaboration among German churches across the American west. This collection includes the incorporation records, minutes, correspondence, and some publications of the General Conference.
Massachusetts Conference. Essex South; Essex North. Records and Minutes, 1827-1972. The library had Essex records for years, but they had been in several separate collections. When the library acquired new material in 2008, we were motivated to consolidate. Includes the following five sub-sections: Essex South Association; Essex South Branch Missionary Association; Essex South Conference of Churches; Essex South South County Branch, Woman's Board of Missions, Executive Committee, also known as Essex South District; Essex North Association.

Konstancja Sinczak's contribution:
Massachusetts Council of Churches. Records, 1887-Present. Kasia organized the photographs- Photographs of the activities of MCC and MCC affiliated groups. New analog additions dating after 2006 are not expected in any great volume due to the favoring of digital technologies. A more in depth guide to the photographs has been appended to this guide.  The main guide now includes an overview of photograph subjects, as well as a more in-depth list. Both are appended to the web page version of the guide (link above).