Beacon Street Diary

New archival collection -- Haverhill, MA: First Congregational Church

We are pleased to announce a new addition to our collection! The First Congregational Church of Haverhill, MA records have been processed and are now available to researchers. These records document the history of the church and its various iterations from 1859 to 2012.

First Congregational Church traces its roots back to the 17th-century First Parish in Haverhill. Its building was constructed in 1859, when it was named North Church, and boasted beautiful Tiffany stained glass memorial windows installed at the beginning of the 20th century. Overall, this collection offers considerable insight into the changing nature of the church and the city of Haverhill in the 19th and 20th centuries.

-Cristina

New collection -- Congregational Association of Detroit

The library has gotten several new collections in over the past few months, including a group of records from the Michigan Conference, UCC. They had been holding onto pre-UCC material that they realized would be better served in our space. Of that set, the largest collection (one banker's box worth) is from the Congregational Association of Detroit. The bulk of the material covers the Trustees meetings and minutes from the 1930s-1960s. There is also representation from some women's groups: a Union, a Missionary Union and a Fellowship, to be precise.

We have very little material from the Michigan Conference, so this collection presents a new opportunity to see what the mid-western Congregationalists were doing, particularly during World War II era.

-Jessica

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Update: We found some additional Michigan Conference records among the donated material, so the collection has been expanded and renamed. It is now the Michigan Conference of Congregational Christian Churches.

CL Refresher Course -- using the archive

The archive houses most of our rare and unique materials, including missionary correspondence, illuminated Bibles, maps, three-dimensional objects, photographs, lithographs, and glass-plate slides. The bulk of it, however, is comprised of record collections from Congregational churches and organizations that have closed their doors. These collections usually contain records of membership, board meeting activities, auxiliary committees, publications, and correspondence.

Because each congregation is responsible for its own record keeping, the size and details vary greatly, and not every extinct church sends their records to us. That doesn't necessarily mean that we can't help you find the information you're looking for, though. Here are a few tips to get you started.

 

"Do you have the records for XYZ Church?"

This question can be about a closed or active church. My first response will be what luck you may have had in our online catalog. All processed church collections that reside in our archive are listed there. We also have a set of pages on the website that list all of our finding guides; more recently added collections have embedded guides, while guides for older collections have been scanned to PDF (and will be converted later).

The catalog also includes material from our "local church history" section that houses both formal and informal histories as well as published material created by the church. Town histories are also a good resource. Individual ministers' sermons are in -- you guessed it -- the sermon section.

If you do not find what you are looking for on the website or within the catalog, you are welcome to call or email us. While it would be exciting to be the storehouse for all Congregational church records, our collection is limited to what is sent to us by the church, usually after it closes. If you are looking for records from an active congregation, they should still have them or at least know where they are kept.

 

"Do you have the baptismal / marriage / membership record for [a person] ?"

We most often get this question from genealogists, or from parents whose children are getting married in a Catholic church and need to provide proof of baptism. As mentioned above, we are not the repository for every Congregational church the way a diocese office is. Finding a mention of a specific church member starts by finding the records of the church they belonged to.

If you do see that we have records from the church you're looking for, the next step is to check the finding guide to determine whether it lists that kind of information. The more you know before you visit or contact us, the easier it will be to find specific lines in the church's record books.

 

"Do you have a picture of [a person or place] ?"

Our former archives assistant, Abraham, created a fantastic guide to finding items in our Image Collection, which is a great place to start. That collection is still being added to the online catalog, so if you don't find what you're looking for, please feel free to contact us for a second look.

We are also compiling a database of images depicting prominent people and places within the books in our collection. It is not available to the public, but we'll be happy to check that as well.

Updated resource -- William Eleazar Barton collection

As one of my first projects when I started here at the library in June, Jessica asked me to continue to re-house the lantern slide collection of William Eleazar Barton that she had started. It was a simple and satisfying project that required no learning curve or institutional memory and also was perfect for those times when your brains started hurting from the deep thinking you are doing for more challenging projects.

Once I was finished I went to add the slides to the rest of the Barton collection, and that was when I realized that the finding guide could probably use a bit of revamping. So began my first finding guide overhaul here at the Congregational Library. It was fun, the collection was super interesting, and I learned a lot about how to create a Congregational-Library-approved finding guide.

For your informational pleasure, a bright, shiny new finding guide is now available on our website: William Eleazar Barton papers, 1888-1953.

This collection contains the papers of William Eleazar Barton and family from 1888-1953 (with the bulk covering 1888-1930). Papers include correspondence; writings such as sermons, lectures, articles and outlines for books; photographs, scrapbooks, and printed materials; Barton's lantern slide collection; and materials created and related to Barton's son and author of "History of Business", Bruce Barton.

-April

New Archival Collections from Arlington and Cambridge, Mass.

We are pleased to announce that two more collection finding guides are up on our website. One is from Arlington, MA : Pleasant Street Congregational Church and the other is from Cambridge, MA : Pilgrim Congregational Church of Cambridgeport.

It is sad for a community when a church closes, as Pleasant Street did earlier this year and as Pilgrim did 19 years ago. Although it is the end of a community, it is not an end to the heritage and memory of the community and organization since they will live on through their records. With these two collections now open for patrons to view, it is up to the community to use these materials to preserve the memory of these, now gone, organizations.

Pleasant Street Congregational Church was formed in 1842 as the Orthodox Congregational Church of West Cambridge. By 1953, the Church had its current name. The records of the church contain organizational records, such as meeting minutes, annual reports, and financial statements, records from auxiliary groups, which organized events and the Sunday School, and photographs of the church and church functions. I would like to thank Stefanie Maclin for doing the initial processing of the records and the leadership of the church for transferring the records to the Congregational Library.

Pilgrim Congregational Church of Cambridgeport was formed in 1863 as Stearns Chapel and closed in 1992. The records contain materials that document the history and life of the church, from the early days as Stearns Chapel through the closure. The records include membership records, minutes, financial records, photographs, and historical information, such as from church anniversaries. We owe our thanks to one of our Simmons GSLIS interns, Helen Schubert, who processed the collection and wrote the finding guide during spring semester, 2011.

For more information on archival collections held at the Congregational Library, please view the electronic finding guides. For more information on church records, please search the Congregational Library catalog for “Church Records and Registers.”

--Abraham

Update on Catharine Brown, and a continuation of the Cherokee theme this week

I am happy to report that we have a new and improved guide to the Catharine Brown Collection. What was a general reference question became a test run for an upcoming project to re-evaluate our Small Collections, which will be implemented this summer by a Simmons intern. This has been a fortuitous mini-project because we determined that our current scanners are not large enough to accommodate full legal length paper, a snag we will have to address in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, Miss Brown's guide is on the website for everyone to use.

Thanks to Abe and Robin for making sure the guide looks so good.

-Jessica

New archival collection - First Church of Cambridge

"A church was gathered at Cambridge (then called Newtown) on or shortly before Oct. 11, 1633."

Over the past four centuries, the church now called First Church in Cambridge has been through a lot of changes, but its records remain. Until recently, some of them were housed Harvard University's Houghton Library. Last year the church itself requested that the Congregational part be moved to our care in order to make them more accessible to the general public. A finding guide for this collection, complete with detailed materials list and links to the records for other collections in their multi-denominational history, is now available on our website.

New digital resource - Chaplains collection finding guide

Sometimes we receive more materials than we can integrate into our collections in a reasonable amount of time. And sometimes those materials get tucked into a corner where they are forgotten for years at a time.  Such is the case with the recently reprocessed Congregational Christian Chaplains Applicant collection. We received this collection from the UCC Archives back in 1997 in good condition, but it needed a little tweaking and a finding guide to make it really useful for our researchers.

Military chaplains provide valuable councel to the men and women of our armed forces during trying times and, as such, they are carefully chosen through an application process. This collection includes application materials -- photographs, bureaucratic forms, reference letters, pamphlets, typed manuscript sermons written by candidates, publicity material, and correspondence. Most of the files are from World War II, but there are some dating both earlier and later. We expect that this collection will be useful to genealogists and church historians alike.

When Projects Collide

Some projects collide. My space management project and Robin's finding guide rehabilitation, for example. While I was reviewing Stubbs and Pratt, as mentioned on Monday, Robin pointed out to me that the Congregational Education Society (CES) and the American Education Society (AES) had guides that prompted a spate of questions. Questions lead to investigation, which we did. These are basically the same organization with a name change, and they live next to each other in the Rare Book Room.

I noticed AES took up about 13 linear feet with its 10-11 boxes. CES a whopping 32 feet and 36 boxes. Hm. That's sort of a lot. The original processing choices limited itself mainly to the banker's (Hollinger) box, but then not all the boxes were entirely filled. Additionally, some boxes looked to have a disproportionate folder to material ratio. Both collections had guides that were dozens of pages long, as Robin had so helpfully pointed out. It was time to get a version that was a little more sleek and computer-friendly.

Both collections are now re-sorted. I've reclaimed hundreds of folders, and thinned the guides dramatically. I now have 5 empty shelves!

-Jessica

Loy and Edna Long: Missionary Collection

As part of my space survey, I came across an unprocessed box of records. Not only unprocessed, but had fallen off the grid and deemed lost for several years. No, not lost- it was there the whole time.

I present to you the Loy L. and Edna Long collection. The Longs spent time in India from 1920s-1950s. Mr. Long also worked behind the scenes with the American Board as the Personnel Secretary. The papers were donated in the (likely) 1970s by the Longs and were organized into binders with tables of contents and page numbers; the original order has been maintained.

-Jessica