History through church documents

This is a short abstract of a really interesting article. Please hit the link for the full writing, but this would be a real interesting read, a look at local society at the beginning of this country. Back then churches often were the center of local society and there is much to give insight to the people who live then. Prof Cooper, I hope you put this online, it would be interesting to read.

In Church Attics, Clues to the Private Life of Early America

Preserving the Church’s Past

STURBRIDGE, Mass. — Sarah Blanchard was sorry she skipped a worship service. Sarah Wood apologized for denouncing infant baptisms. And as for the Cheneys, Joseph and Abigail? Well, “with shame, humiliation and sorrow,” they acknowledged having had sex before marriage.

More than 250 years ago, their confessions of sin were dutifully logged by the minister of the church here, alongside records of baptisms, marriages and deaths, notes about meetings heated and routine, accounts of finances, texts of sermons, and, in some cases, personal accounts of conversion experiences from young adults.

Now, in a regionwide scavenger hunt, a pair of historians is rummaging through New England church basements and attics, file cabinets, safes and even coat closets, searching for these records of early American life. The historians are racing against inexorable church closings, occasional fires, and a more mundane but not uncommon peril: the actual loss of documents, which most often occurs when a church elder dies and no one can remember the whereabouts of historical papers.

A congregation record dating to 1744, found in the basement of a church in Dudley, Mass. Credit Katherine Taylor for The New York Times

“I have seen them be destroyed, lost, covered with mold or just forgotten,” said the Rev. Janet Leighninger, the pastor of the Federated Church of Sturbridge and Fiskdale here. “And as finances get tighter, as they are everywhere, and as congregations shrink, and they are doing that in many places, it becomes a matter of, ‘Do we do the ministry we are called to do, or do we preserve the past?’ ”

The historians — James Fenimore Cooper Jr., a professor of history at Oklahoma State University, and Margaret Bendroth, the executive director of the Congregational Library in Boston — are trying to persuade small town church leaders to turn over their records for digitization and preservation. They are focusing largely on Massachusetts because the record keeping there was especially careful, and on congregational churches, or their successors, because those were the official churches in colonial Massachusetts.

“There is no other discrete set of sources that will similarly transport us into colonial America,” said Dr. Cooper, who has been searching for hidden church records for years. Among the treasures he has described: a 1773 application from a slave named Cuffee to join a church in Middleboro.

The records, especially those that are not bound into books, are often in poor shape. In Sturbridge, a church member in 1896 described a set of papers as “much worn and mutilated”; now, more than a century later, those same papers are in a faded yellow envelope marked “extremely poor condition.” The churches themselves, which are Protestant and are called Congregational because each is independent and has the authority to make its own decisions, are endangered as well. There remain 372 in Massachusetts affiliated with the United Church of Christ, the largest congregational denomination, down from 625 in 1932.

James Fenimore Cooper Jr. worked with Linda Grant, the administrator of the Faith Community Church of Hopkinton, Mass., to find and preserve treasures. Credit Katherine Taylor for The New York Times

The record-retrieval effort is painstaking. Every summer, Dr. Cooper (no relation to the 19th-century author; his grandparents were just admirers) and Dr. Bendroth travel from church to church, trying to persuade ministers and lay leaders to part with treasured documents. In some cases, churches are excited to do so. But for some of the churches, letting go of documents is difficult — the papers, even if brittle and faded, are a form of patrimony, like silver and pewter communion vessels, to be treasured.

One evening this summer, Dr. Cooper visited the Federated Church of Sturbridge and Fiskdale, a congregation that resulted from a merger of several different churches and that is now affiliated with the United Church of Christ, the American Baptist Churches, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. The congregation’s records — at least those representing its congregational past, which began in 1736 — had been retrieved from a safe at a member’s office....