Beacon Street Blog

The CLA's archivists, Zachary Bodnar and Billy McCarthy, recently hosted a virtual program on "Demystifying Archivist Speak," to help church archivists learn some of the essential terminology associated with archival practice. The video is now available on our YouTube channel, and the list below offers a quick reference guide to the 28 terms they discussed in more detail during the program.

1. Accession: the materials physically and officially transferred to a repository.
2. Appraisal: the process of determining whether records and other materials have permanent (archival) value.
3. Arrangement: the process of organizing materials to protect their context and to achieve physical control over the materials.
4. Born Digital: originating in a computer environment.
5. Digitize: to transform analog information into digital form.
6. Cataloging: the process of providing access to materials by creating formal descriptions to represent the materials.
7. Collection Management: the set of activities and policies associated with maintaining archival resources.
8. Collection: a set of archival or manuscript materials.
9. Creator: the individual, group, or organization that is responsible for something's production, accumulation, or formation.
10. Custodial History: the succession of entities that held a certain body of archival materials.
11. Description: the process of creating a set of data representing an archival resource.
12. Disaster Plan: an actively maintained document containing procedures and information needed to prevent, mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies.
13. Ephemera: materials created for a specific, limited purpose, and generally designed to be discarded after use.
14. Facsimile: a reproduction that simulates the appearance of the original as closely as possible.
15. Finding Aid: a description that typically consists of contextual and structural information about an archival resource.
16. Manuscript: a handwritten or unpublished document.
17. Metadata: information about data that promotes discovery, structures data objects, and supports the administration and preservation of records.
18. Pagination: the act of numbering each side of a leaf/page in a manuscript or volume.
19. Records: information or data created or received by an organization in the course of its activities; organizational records.
20. Papers: records created and originally kept by an individual or a family.
21. Preservation: the act of keeping from harm, injury, decay, or destruction, especially through noninvasive treatment.
22. Processing: preparing archival materials for use.
23. Provenance: information regarding the origins, custody, and ownership of an item or collection.
24. Respect des Fonds: the principle maintaining records according to their origin and in the units in which they were originally accumulated
25. Records Management: the systematic and administrative control of records throughout their life cycle to ensure efficiency and economy in their creation, use, handling, control, maintenance, and disposition.
26. Red Rot: the process of leather deterioration characterized by orange or reddish powder
27. Retention Schedule: a document that identifies and describes an organization’s records, usually at the series level, and provides instructions for the disposition of records throughout their life cycle
28. Vital Statistics: public records required by law that document significant life events, such as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and public health events.

These definitions predominantly use language from the Society of American Archivists’ Dictionary of Archival Terms, available online at https://dictionary.archivists.org/index.html

Sara Georgini, Historian and Series Editor, The Papers of John Adams

 

Where do you go to trace how presidents prayed? When I was researching Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family, I headed for the Congregational Library & Archives’ trove of primary and secondary sources to illuminate 300 years’ worth of religion at home and abroad. Thanks to the wealth of love letters and state secrets preserved in the Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, we know that John and Abigail Adams of Quincy--and their descendants--operated at the heart of political power.

What can we say of their inner lives of belief? Fascinated by faith and less invested in mastering theology, they used religion as a key to access other cultures and to make lasting connections between family life and public service.

Here’s a playlist of 5 sources at the CLA that challenged what I knew and shaped my scholarship.

1. Let’s start with . . . a scandal! One of my all-time favorite CLA catalog subject headings is “Church of England-Controversial Literature.” Go ahead and click! William Laud, powerful archbishop of Canterbury, led the Church of England’s fierce reaction to fresh forms of Christianity, like Puritanism, during the social and cultural tumult of the 17th century. Laud’s sweeping reforms spurred the emigration of the English Adamses and their friends to America. Then, fortune and royal favor turned against him. Learn all about his doctrine, his alleged treason, and his time in Laud's Tower in The History of the Troubles and Tryal of William Laud.
2. With the American colonies tipping toward revolution, what did women and men like the Adamses really know of their Puritan forebears? When Braintree’s star lawyer, John Adams, penned his Novanglus letters in 1774–1775, he turned to the past for a political assist. Adams believed that the Puritans offered a sterling example of intellectuals who defied royal oppression thanks to timely providential aid. This idea, that an omniscient God turned the pages of history and intervened in human events, powered American revolutionaries questing for independence.
3. Next stop, early republic. Liberal Congregationalist John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, wed the Anglican Louisa Catherine Johnson in 1797. They explored foreign faiths abroad, stocking the Stone Library shelves with Bibles in Hawaiian, Latin, French, Spanish, and English. Whenever they returned to the family’s ancestral home of New England, they eagerly sampled different churches and used their diaries to spin out spiritual reflections or critique sermons. For a snapshot of the dynamic Congregational world in this moment, check out the records, journals, and local biographies that bloom to life in New England’s Hidden Histories.
4. When Civil War splintered the nation, related questions of faith and Providence magnetized Americans like Charles Francis Adams and his wife, Abigail Brooks Adams, to explore faith. Blending together manuscripts, family memories, and material culture, I reconstructed the kind of Christian space that Abigail created at Peacefield (now the Adams National Historical Park). She prominently displayed a gilded Bible in the foyer as a welcoming signpost to visitors. She kept old Dutch fireplace tiles that taught scripture stories at a child’s height during cozy nights. And when winter closed in, freezing out their best intentions to walk to church, Abigail led the family in singing hymns and reciting prayers. More than once, I turned for reference to Colleen McDannell’s Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840–1900, and I eavesdropped on the past thanks to Susan S. Tamke’s Make a Joyful Noise unto the Lord: Hymns as a Reflection of Victorian Social Attitudes.
5. As a new century swept in, modern descendants of the Adams clan, like historians Henry and Brooks, traveled widely and investigated Catholic, Hindu, and Buddhist practices and beliefs. They mined religion to understand what it said about the course of the past, and to project what might come next in the American Century. To see how and why 20th-century Protestant elites grappled with Puritan ancestry (real and imagined), I sought out CLA’s deep holdings on the cultural politics of Puritan memory studies. Margaret Lamberts Bendroth’s The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past supplied rich source leads. A quick scan of the CLA’s catalog unveiled plenty of promising research webs between the rhetorical systems of commonwealths and covenants. For slightly competing views of religion’s future from John and Abigail’s decidedly cosmopolitan descendants, check out Brooks’ Emancipation of Massachusetts and medievalist Henry Adams’ true autobiography of the soul, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

And! Visit the CLA reading room now, open by appointment, to get your own playlist humming.

Billy McCarthy, CLA Archivist

In our “Archiving Your Church’s Records” program at 1 pm (EST) on October 13th, Zachary Bodnar and I will provide a short introduction to get you thinking about how to better preserve the mission, community, and history of your church. As a small preview, here are a few quick tips to get you started:

1. Think about where your church's records are currently located and start trying to gather them in a single location if possible. You would be surprised by how much can be found in your church members' attics, basements, and closets.

2. Think small! Doing this work can seem daunting, but by tackling it a little at a time you will see how fruitful it can be for your community.

3. Digitization is an excellent choice for increasing access to your church’s records but should not be seen as an effective method for preservation. Proper care for the physical originals will always be worth it.

We look forward to seeing those of you who can attend, and if you’re not able to make it, watch for a video of the program on our YouTube channel in a few weeks.

by Sara Trotta, Librarian

At a specialty library like the Congregational Library, where most of the books in our collection are not the sort of thing you’d find at your local public library, how do we decide what qualifies as rare? The CLA has a circulating collection, a non-circulating collection, and a “Rare Books” collection. “Rare Books” tend to be our most valuable items, which is why we keep them in the enhanced security of our Rare Book Room. We even have “The Cage” where the most valuable of our rare books are located. Our circulating collection consists of books printed in the last 35 years. The non-circulating collection is basically everything else. Some items in our rare books collection were placed there immediately after we acquired them while others were relocated from the non-circulating collection in the stacks.

Why would we move something from the stacks into the Rare Book Room?  There’s the standard definition: a rare book is scarce or otherwise hard to come by. Many rare books are old--the older some thing is, the less likely it is to have survived to the present day. But a book does not need to be old in order to be rare. Similarly, many rare books are valuable, since scarcity tends to drive up prices, but this is only true so long as a book is in demand. You can have the last remaining copy of On the Training and Taming of Llamas, but unless there are other people interested in historical llama domestication practices, the book will not be very valuable.

Many of the library’s books could be considered rare. This is one of the reasons why our circulating collection is limited to books printed in the last 35 years. At a small library with a very particular topical focus like ours, many books are from small religious publishers printed in small quantities. Many of them are now out of print which would make replacing them if they become damaged or lost difficult.

Unlike college or public libraries, the stacks at the CLA are “closed,” meaning only the staff have access and will retrieve books for patrons. This gives us an added layer of security and protection for all of our material and this means we can be more selective about which items require the added measures that the rare book room provides. Additionally, while the environment of the stacks is controlled for temperature and humidity, there are bound to be some fluctuations in such a large space that won’t always be caught quickly. The Rare Book Room is a smaller area with a climate that can be more tightly controlled for the books and archival materials which are the most fragile.

Right now, as we prepare to move the Rare Book Collection back into the Rare Book Room now that the renovation has been completed, we are taking all of these factors into account. Space in the Rare Book Room is limited and in “The Cage” more limited still, so we assess how valuable an item is in terms of how much money it is worth, but also how central it is to the library’s mission. We consider the age and physical stability of an item. We consider grouping similar items together so they can be co-located, such as facsimiles and their originals.Like a parent, I may think all of our books are special, but ‘rare’ is best measured in differences of degree rather than of kind, and sorted out in a process that is sometimes more art than science.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the Congregational Church of South Hadley Falls records, 1824-2012, contains many thousands of words. The collection contains a vast trove of photographs from throughout the church’s history, though especially from the later half of the twentieth century. These photographs contain many hundreds of memories of the people, places, and events that make up the history of the Congregational Church of South Hadley Falls.

These photographs also provide us windows into the traditions and happenings of the past. Many pieces of forgotten americana and old memories are certainly held within the collection. Among my personal favorites though are two images of youths, wearing sports uniforms and football helmets, carrying a basketball, and atop donkeys. These are two pictures of an exhibition sport known as donkey basketball.

Donkey basketball is certainly a unique piece of americana. Generally held as a special fundraising event, donkey basketball is very much what the name suggests, basketball, but the players are all riding atop donkeys. There is no dribbling, the teams are smaller, and to touch the basketball, one must be atop their steed. Donkey basketball dates all the way back to the 1930s, though the peak of donkey basketball was likely during the 1960s or 70s. Donkey basketball does still occur across America, though it’s popularity as a fundraising event has waned, especially in the 21st century due in large part over concerns for the welfare of the donkeys.

While we might not be able to identify the names of the youths atop the donkeys, nor do we know the exact date of these two photographs, it does not detract at all from the importance of these memories in photograph form. Photographs, first physical and now digital, have become one of the most important tools for people, and churches, to document daily life. Where once written word really was one of the only ways to consistently learn about daily life, photographs provide significant insights into the lives of 20th and 21st century persons. And as the donkey photographs show, these photographs can teach us about the various traditions and events once held in places which may have since become otherwise forgotten.

The mission of the CLA is to preserve the memories of the churches whose records are held at the CLA. Memories are stored in all types of records, from the memories of parish decisions kept in ledger books, to the memories of important life events found in vital records, to the memories of pastors found within church communications and sermon notes. And of course, you have the memories of church life found in photographs and scrapbooks. All these memories are precious and important, and we take these memories seriously all throughout the process of acquisition and processing. During acquisition, we try to ensure that we capture as much of a church’s documented memory as possible. And during processing, we not only ensure that descriptions make visible these memories in the finding aid, but also ensure that the materials are stored in ways that guarantee their long-term preservation. As an example, bond paper, a type of archival safe paper, is interleaved between every photograph to help ensure the long-term preservation of those photographs in the South Hadley Falls collection.

When looking through the photographs of the Congregational Church of South Hadley Falls, the two photographs of donkey basketball stood out to me, in large part because they showed me a type of event that I had no idea existed before seeing these pictures. But any one set of photographs could have captured my imagination and curiosity. And its for that very reason, that sense of discovery and excitement, that we are so honored to be a repository of these memories.

by Sara Trotta, Librarian

Is there anything better than that new book smell? Maybe new old book smell and fortunately, at the Congregational Library, I regularly get to experience both. Recently, the library staff came together to discuss some suggestions for new material to be added to the circulating collection.

Deciding what to add to the library’s collection is a complex process. For our circulating collection, we look for books that are relevant to our mission and books that will help support research into the library’s primary sources. The staff also takes into account gaps in our collection and try to predict what will be useful to researchers in the future while balancing all of this with a limited budget. This time we were able to purchase nearly all of the staff suggestions. Here are some of our favorites:

Doomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth Century America by Christine Leigh Heyrman

 

 

 

Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 by Phillip H. Round

Removable Type features the CLA’s own copy of the “Eliot Indian Bible”, the first Bible printed in the United States which was printed not in English, but in an Algonquin dialect. From the back cover blurb: “Removable Type Showcases the varied ways that Native peoples produced and utilized printed texts over time, approaching them as both opportunity and threat.” Given the significance of early interactions between Congregational colonizers with Native peoples that extend into the 19th century, this book has a lot of relevance to the collection beyond the Eliot Bible.

 

 

 

Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War by David E. Swift.

This book was recommended to us by Richard Taylor, author of The Churches of Christ of the Congregational Way in New England as well as other regional indexes, an invaluable resource. Black Prophets of Justice describes the lives and contributions of several Black Congregational ministers, stories that have been otherwise untold.

All of these titles are available to be  borrowed by members of the library. You can search for them (and more!) in our online catalog. If you have a suggestion for a book to add to the collection, please write to us at ref@14beacon.org.

by Zachary Bodnar, Archivist

Work continues apace with moving our digital New England’s Hidden Histories (NEHH) collections over into our new Quartex digital asset management (DAM) system. We are now about nearly complete with phase two of the project! Which keeps us on schedule for our initial launch in the fall of 2021. Some fun facts, we have uploaded almost 60,000 images into Quartex now across 960 individual items. I cannot properly describe how excited we are for our eventual launch. Instead, I can talk about metadata! Our day-to-day work with Quartex involves creating new metadata for each digital object. So today I wanted to talk a bit about how the Congregational Library & Archives (CLA) creates metadata for digital objects and, more specifically, how the CLA created a custom metadata schema for digital objects from a plethora of outside sources and the customizable tools provided by Quartex.

Metadata is intrinsically connected to the work of librarians and archivists. But what exactly is metadata? The dictionary definition for metadata is “data that provides information about other data” or put simply “data about data.” But even that definition feels lacking for just how important metadata is in the information science fields. For librarians and archivists, metadata is information about a resource, be it a book, manuscript, or collection, that describes and contextualizes the resource so that people may discover, find, and know about the resource. If you have ever used a library catalog, whether it be an online catalog or card catalog, you have firsthand experience using metadata to search and browse. Though the rules and structure of metadata have changed over the years, especially with the proliferation of electronic systems, metadata has ever been a part of the work of both librarians and archivists.

Metadata broadly falls into three large categories. Descriptive metadata is information that describes the “facts” about a resource, such as the title or the resource or the creator of the resource. Administrative metadata is information related to the management of a resource and covers things such as use permissions and copyright information. Finally, structural metadata is information about how a resource is put together and can describe such facets as the order of pages within a resource or the type of relationship between two different resources. A fully realized metadata model must take into account all three of these metadata types as each is vitally important for a user to both find a resource, understand what they are looking at, and know how they may use and access it.

Fortunately for librarians and archivists, much of the work related to the form and content of metadata has been done for us in the form of widely accepted metadata standards; these standards, at least within the USA, are often maintained by national institutions, such as the Library of Congress, or national organizations, such as the Society of American Archivists and American Library Association. In the United States, librarians use the MARC (machine-readable cataloging) standards to determine how information is formatted and presented and RDA (resource description and access) to determine the content of a catalog record. Likewise, archivists in the United States have DACS (describing archives: a content standard) which governs how archivists create nearly every aspect of finding aids. The reason these metadata standards are important is because they standardize metadata between otherwise unconnected organizations and creators; this makes the metadata interoperable between systems and ensures a uniform set of experiences and expectations for all users.

But what about digital resources? Digital resources, by their very nature, require a whole new set of metadata standards. DACS has been a great boon for archivists, but it does not exactly help a digital archivist who finds they need a metadata field for describing the digital object’s file type or the differences between multiple versions of the same digital object. The good news is that additional and emerging content standards have been created for digital resources. Unfortunately, there is not a single “all encompassing” standard for digital resources that might be the equivalent of DACS or MARC. Instead, the people who manage digital resources have a plethora of imperfect choices to make. And the result is often an unfortunate combination of worry, analysis paralysis, and confusion. After all, while librarians have a standard in MARC that is decades old, the managers of digital resources still exist on a sort of new frontier.

There are, for digital objects, four major content standards that exist. (There are many more than four metadata standards for digital resources, but outside these four the remaining standards are usually niche and designed for a single type of digital resource such as scientific data sets). Dublin Core (DC) is probably the most common standard, in large part because it is incredibly flexible. DC, which tends to focus on descriptive metadata, has very few rules governing the form of information nor does it make any of its fields mandatory; in essence DC is the ultimate pick and choose metadata standard. Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) is the other major content standard focused on descriptive metadata. MODS has significantly more rules governing form and content, which makes it difficult to implement, but covers many important descriptive avenues that DC does not necessarily cover. Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is focused almost entirely on structural metadata, such as how digital files are organized, while Preservation Metadata Maintenance Activity (PREMIS) is almost entirely focused on administrative metadata, specifically metadata related to every single facet of the creation, maintenance, and preservation of a digital file.

When the CLA first began to work with the Quartex system, the very first thing we needed to do was to create a list of metadata fields. Quartex, being an incredibly flexible system on the backend, does not have any prescribed fields, outside of a mandatory title field, so we certainly had options. We could make our metadata as complex, or as simple, as we wanted. We could also wholesale port a metadata standard, such as DC, into Quartex, and call it a day. Instead, what we did was take an exceptionally long and hard look at the above four metadata standards and took what we felt was the best parts of those standards and created our very own schema that works for us.

We first determined what the goal of our metadata schema was going to be. Quartex, being primarily used as a public access point for all our digital content, we determined that our metadata had to focus primarily on the needs of our external users. Descriptive metadata, and metadata related to the creation and distribution of the digital resource were deemed to be the most important type of metadata to help users find and understand our digital content. That meant, that as important and useful as PREMIS and METS can be, those standards were leaned upon significantly less as METS and PREMIS metadata is most useful for internal preservation purposes. That left us with DC and MODS as our primary go-to models. Each has their strengths and weakness. While DC has a field for geographic metadata, MODS does not, and while MODS has a field for a genre/form term, DC does not. So, we determined what we felt were the descriptive strengths of these two models and combined them.

The result was a schema of 29 metadata fields which covers everything from a title filed to a field devoted to an item’s provenance. We made sure that every metadata field we created was documented extensively. Part of that documentation was ensuring that each metadata field which had an equivalent field in a different metadata model was enumerated and linked; this will ensure that, in the future, our metadata can be made more interoperable with external systems. We further enumerated what standards, such as which international standard for language terms, we would use for fields that required such standards. And for fields which necessitated strict vocabularies, such as the “type” field which describes the primary content of a digital object, we listed out each of the vocab terms that could be used within that field. We then went through the list of metadata fields to determine which would be required fields. We determined few fields should be made required to ease cataloging since information for any given field might be difficult to determine, if not outright impossible. Still, while most fields are not required, we have strongly encouraged providing as much descriptive information as possible for each asset. Next, we determined which metadata fields would be free text fields and which would be controlled vocabulary fields. Quartex allows for the linking of shared metadata terms if the data is stored as a controlled vocabulary. Any field, such as the subject, name, creator, and camera model fields, which might share metadata between otherwise unconnected resource, was made into a controlled vocabulary field to allow for easy linked data; this allows users to instantly search for “similar” materials with a single click of a mouse.

It can certainly feel daunting to create a metadata schema from scratch. The flexibility in metadata creation Quartex offers is amazing, but when you are just starting with only a title field, it can be easy to wish for a more prescribed schema. Add in the fact that there are numerous metadata schemas for digital content, and you have the formula for confusion and doubt as you move forward. But, as I hope this blog has helped illustrate, going through the process of figuring out a schema that works locally that is focused on the users of the system, will pay dividends. And perhaps most important, is simply to document these decisions. Quartex’s flexibility ensures that we are not permanently locked into a decision we might have made too hastily. We used a pilot period to test an early version of our metadata model and determined that numerous changes needed to be made. For us, many of those changes were related to fields which we had thought should be required cataloging fields; through our pilot though we realized that some of those initially required fields, in certain circumstances, could not be meaningfully filled out necessitating a reversal on their required status. Metadata is the backbone of our work as librarians and archivists, and that has never been truer than now with digital records.

Since our initial pilot and now through the end of phase two of our migration, we have been using the metadata model to create new metadata for every digital object within NEHH. Due to the limitations of our previous web-based NEHH browsing solution, some of which I have talked about before, most of our digital NEHH collections, let alone the individual items, lacked a lot of the metadata that you might expect from a digital archive. This is no one’s fault; NEHH as a project is older than some of the metadata models for digital resources I have listed above! But it has meant doing a lot of catch-up work; all told by the end of this migration I will have been working almost exclusively on metadata creation for about 10 months. But the result will be so worth it. Where the 1735-1822 parish records for First Parish in Brunswick, Maine, simply had a title, date, and short description listed on the CLA’s website, the Quartex record for the same item lists so much more information from subject and geographic coverage fields, to fields describing how many images comprise the whole object, to a rights statement that links out to the appropriate RightsStatement.org boilerplate, to a field letting you know the exact make and model of camera used to photograph the original object. The result of all this work is a wealth of metadata which we hope will make these already amazing and useful digital resources even more accessible, easier to navigate, and far more descriptive and precise about what exactly each digital object is. There is still a lot of work to be done between now and our soft launch in the early fall, but we are so excited and energized by our work because we know you too will be energized and excited when you see the Quartex site launch!

The whole of our metadata model, as well as some of the particulars of our Quartex configuration, have been extensively and continuously documented. For those interested, you can view the current version of our metadata model here. If you have questions about our metadata model, or are yourself looking to create a metadata model for your digital resources, please feel free to reach out to me.

by Zachary Bodnar, Archivist

It has been a little while since I have last written a blog here on the Beacon Street Diary. And that is because we have been hard at work migrating our New England’s Hidden Histories (NEHH) collections to Quartex, our new Digital Asset Management system. We have been, one by one, uploading NEHH collections into Quartex and providing each and every item brand new metadata, enhancing both the searchability of individual items and bringing much needed descriptive clarity that will help users find relations between disparate items and collection. I hope you are excited because the team here at the CLA is absolutely ecstatic. You will be able to explore these important digital collections in many new and exciting ways that greatly enhance the research experience and hopefully introduce these records to many more people.

I am happy to officially report that Phase 1 of this three-part migration project has now been completed and on schedule. Phase 1 was focused on the comparatively smaller NEHH collections. This allowed us to work on many collections over a shorter period of time, which hashelped the team to get familiar with, and further refine, the migration workflow. We have completed the migration of 97 NEHH collections into Quartex. This accounts for approximately 60% of the total number of NEHH collections (but not necessarily 60% of the total volume of NEHH). Each collection is comprised of individual items; to date we have uploaded over 297 items, (also sometimes referred to as assets or resources depending on the context). Each of these items is comprised of multiple images, the vast majority of which are JPEGs. In total, we have uploaded over 39,000 images. Phase 2 will change focus to somewhat larger, by volume, and more complex collections, but, based on the work we have already completed, we are expecting to remain on schedule. This means that we still believe that our soft launch date of early Fall is still reasonable and within reach.

Phase 1, in many ways, was the proof-of-concept phase of this migration project as it allowed us to put our workflows through the ringer in a controlled environment. And, more importantly, phase 1 offered us plenty of opportunities to work with a wide variety of materials and to experiment with ways to make those records more visible and easily found.  Navigation can be the difference maker when it comes to ensuring someone can find the exact item they are lookingfor. After a few months working with Quartex, we are hopeful that we will be able to provide excellent navigation to all our materials.

In the past I have talked about linked metadata as an important part of the navigation formula, and this remains true. It is safe to say that most of our metadata work is focused on attaching relevant subject, geographic, name, and genre terms to every asset. But today I wanted to talk about a couple of other features in Quartex that enhance navigation; the first of which will look quite familiar to our current users of NEHH.

Within NEHH we have arranged records into three browsable “series”. This was an early decision to help with navigation by grouping like materials into a single web page. With Quartex, and its asset-first approach to browsing, the concept of series has become largely moot. However, we still felt that it was important to maintain individual collection pages, analogous to the current NEHH collection pages, and a list of all manuscript collections. Quartex has allowed us to do that, to great effect. Using an A-Z page, we have been creating an updated and accurate list of collections, with abstracts, that navigate to more specific collection pages. On these collection pages, we provide either a historical or biographical note and an image representative of the collection, as well as links to external finding aids or catalog records when appropriate. These collection pages also allow for the user to browse, search, and refine a list of every single asset associated with that collection. Though our work with Quartex will greatly change how we present and make accessible our NEHH collections, as well as all of our non-NEHH digital holdings, some of the good lessons we learned from NEHH have been and will be applied moving forward.

Another area I am greatly excited for is navigation within individual assets. Many of the items within NEHH are bulky record books that are sometimes hundreds of pages long. Finding what you are looking for in that record book can sometimes be a frustrating exercise, one I know all too well. But one tool that Quartex gives us may be able to help. Each asset may be divided into “sections”, each with their own unique name. We have not employed sections extensively yet; really, we’ve only done some light experimenting. But already we can see the potential of this feature. “Tête-bêche” volumes, where usually two distinct records begin at each cover until they meet in the middle, can be split into sections to easily navigate to the two different beginnings in the record. And within Benjamin Wadsworth’s voluminous collection of essay-styled sermons and theological writings, we have used sections to help navigate between the various old testament books Wadsworth wrote about. It may be a long way off, but I sincerely hope that we will have the capability and bandwidth to use sections more extensively in the future to help people navigate these large record books.

The possibilities that Quartex introduce are seemingly limitless, and we keep on finding new andinteresting ways to use features to improve and enhance both the browsing and searching user experiences. Though we are still many months away from our planned soft launch, I already cannot wait to unveil the full scope of this important project and let researchers, genealogists, students, and interested knowledge seekers browse and search these records.

by William McCarthy, Reference and Processing Archivist

While the staff of the CLA have been working from home, we have continued to remain engaged with our collections even while separated from them. Please note that the collections highlighted are not available online unless otherwise noted.

Today, I am going to highlight one of our larger, more well-known collections, the Old South Church in Boston, RG0028. The collection first arrived with us in 1976 and we received additional materials in 1982, 1989, 1997 and 2013. The collection has likewise gone through a few different processing iterations, most recently in 2018. With over 57 boxes and 141 volumes, it is one of the library's largest and most significant collections.

Twenty-eight lay members from the First Church in Boston founded the Old South Congregation (originally called the Third Church of Boston) in 1669. In 1670, the congregation met in the Cedar Meetinghouse for the first time and soon became known as South Church since it was in the south end of town. “Old” was added in 1717 to distinguish it from another church being built, which called itself New South. In 1875, construction on a new church for the Old South congregation finished on the corners of Dartmouth and Boylston Streets. This new site has been Old South's home since. A trademark feature of the Old South Church is its campanile, or tower, which can be seen from several Boston neighborhoods. The church continues to thrive today.

The collection is divided into nine series and twenty-three subseries. Our first series focuses on Legal and Building records and includes a Deed of Land from 1669, among other documents related to land ownership. The second series focuses on numerous Organizations affiliated with Old South Church and includes the Maternal Association, Old South Club, Sewing Circle, Temperance Association, and various educational groups. The third series describes the various church records, such as vital statistics, annual reports, letters of admission and membership indexes. This series contains the record book that logs the baptism of Benjamin Franklin (image attached)!

 

Series four touches on the ministers and deacons of the church and includes notes, sermons, correspondences, and journals. Frederick M. Meek is the minister most represented in this collection with over 300 sermons! The fifth series in the collection covers committee records and pew proprietor records. The sixth series covers material related to Rev. Thomas Prince who bequeathed his literary collection to the church and now resides at the Boston Public Library, it includes correspondences and catalogs. The seventh series of the collection focuses on financial information, mainly that of the treasurer’s records and pew accounts. Series eight is the collection’s smallest and contains photographs and newspaper clippings related to the church. The final collection contains various publications by the church and includes published histories, audio-visual material, published catalogs, bulletins and printed copies of the Old South Record.

As you can see, this collection is filled to the brim with interesting historical information and documents a period of over 350 years! Viewing this collection is a truly fruitful experience and once the library has returned to a normal schedule you should visit!

The legacy finding aid for this collection can be found HERE. If you have any interest in viewing this collection once the library reopens, or you have any other CLA related questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us at ref@14beacon.org. Stay safe and have a great day!

by William McCarthy, Reference and Processing Archivist

While the staff of the CLA have been working from home, we have continued to remain engaged with our collections even while separated from them. These posts will highlight some of our less well-known collections. Please note that the collections highlighted are not available online unless otherwise noted.

Today I want to highlight the Roslindale, Boston, Highland Congregational Church records, 1869-2006, RG4824. The collection was donated to the library in 2007 and processed in 2009.

The Highland Congregational Church’s origins start with the Sunday School affiliated with the Eliot Church. The school’s constant growth led to a discussion about forming a new, separate church. In February of 1869, a meeting on the matter decided that a new church would in fact be formed. A month later, 52 members joined the new Highland Congregational Church. The Eliot City Missionary Society decided to donate their property to the new church and by the end of 1871 the church was fully operational on Parker Street. A Chapel school, also located on Parker Street, would be linked with Highland Congregational Church until it was officially merged in 1897. The church continued to remain on Parker Street all the way until 1978, when a fire damaged the steeple and some of the church records. The church would finally leave its Parker Street location in 1980 and share the Trinity Lutheran Church on Center Street for over two decades. In 2006, the church officially closed due to a declining membership. Over the course of Highland Congregational Church’s existence, they would only have five pastors, with Rev. William Arthur Rice serving the longest at 51 years.

This collection is broken up into 6 separate series and is contained in 13 boxes, making it quite a large collection. The first series, Church Records, contains manuals, meeting minutes, annual reports, financial information, correspondences, and records related to the maintenance of the church. The records in this series only go up to the time right after the move to Trinity Lutheran Church. The second series, Members and Vital Statistics, focuses on births, marriages, deaths, Sunday School material, pastor’s notes, letters of transfers, and sermons. The third series, Auxiliary and Social Groups, focuses on a variety of clubs such as the Women’s Union, Union Mother’s Club, Women’s Missionary Club, Mount Holyoke Bible School and Sunday School. There is also a section of this series which focuses on the history of the church, including programs, activities, and other memorabilia. The fourth series focuses on the Ministers of the church, with a primary focus on Rev. William Arthur Rice sermons, life, and activities in clubs around Boston. The fifth series, newsletters, contains editions of “The Highland Light” between 1891 and 2000, with some gaps. The final series contains two Bibles, one of which is from the church’s opening in 1871. The Highland Congregational Church collection contains so much valuable information that stretches across such a long period of time that it is a treasure trove for researchers or curious individuals! 

The legacy finding aid for this collection can be found HERE. If you have any interest in viewing this collection once the library reopens, or you have any other CLA related questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us at ref@14beacon.org. Stay safe and have a great day!

by Jules Thomson, associate archivist and social media manager

As an archivist and history buff, I've always found my work with New England's Hidden Histories and the in-house archival collections at the CLA to be extremely rewarding. After many years of residing and working in the UK heritage sector I was a relative newcomer to primary American sources, and have been fascinated by the new learning opportunities. But perhaps my favorite project so far has been assisting with the creation of a finding guide for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) within our Hidden Histories records.

Dr. Richard Boles of Oklahoma State University, author of Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North, had previously kindly provided us his own research guide, a carefully compiled and comprehensive list of references to Black and Indigenous members of various New England congregations, identified in the preliminary batch of digitized NEHH church records. (When the new guide was created, this list became the foundation of the "BIPOC in majority-white church records" section.)

Dr. Boles's list-style finding aid was already hosted by the Congregational Library's website, when in summer of 2020 Hidden Histories director Jeff Cooper floated the idea of a more significant expansion. With the blessing of CLA's directorship, we got in touch with Richard to ask if he would be willing to create contextualizing introductions to the newly digitized and identified materials. Between the three of us and our preexisting institutional familiarity with the NEHH materials, we were also able to identify the most pertinent collections to showcase.

Meanwhile, I set about identifying the top categories of our BIPOC-related records in order to split the guide up into more easily-navigable sections, and working within the parameters of our website to format these. We eventually settled on 5 categories, in addition to an introduction and bibliography, each with their own page.

Section one, Firsthand Writings by BIPOC, is a compilation of own voices material including clerical writings by America's first fully-ordained Black minister, Rev. Lemuel Haynes, and a number of relation of faith documents from African American and/or Indigenous congregants who had composed these semi-autobiographical accounts in order to solicit full church membership. These documents represent an unusually intimate glimpse into the spiritual lives of "ordinary" early Americans, rivalled only by diaries and personal correspondence.

The second category, BIPOC Churches and Institutions, showcases historical Black and Indigenous Congregational churches, including churches founded within missionary-established "praying towns". These, along with Black congregations, which were often birthed from a need to escape prejudice within majority-white churches, were relatively few and far between, and the existing records we do host are consequently of great importance.

Indigenous-Focused Records mainly comprise early missionary writings and observations by clergy adjacent to Native communities and churches, such as Rev. William Homes's diary entries mentioning the Wampanoag church and community on Martha's Vineyard. While sadly lacking in firsthand Native voices, this section nonetheless offers up exclusive historical information about several New England tribes. We also decided to include an external link to the already-digitized Mamusse wunneetu-panatamwe Up-Biblum God, John Eliot's translation of the bible into Wôpanâak, a physical version of which the CLA holds in our rare book collections.

BIPOC in Majority-White Church Records, as aforementioned, is primarily the fruit of Dr. Boles's examination of church record books containing racial identifiers next to the names of congregants. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, this practice, despite its origins in white-supremacist gatekeeping, has provided modern researchers with a better demographic picture of church attendance and an insight into lived experiences of people of color in early America, where they might otherwise remain invisible.

In Antislavery and Abolitionist Materials, there is (thus far) only a single manuscript collection - the records and minutes of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. However, we decided to round out the category with an extensive number of catalog links to antislavery print materials held physically in the Congregational Library collections. Though these fall outside the purview of the NEHH digitization program (because they are printed rather than handwritten), many of them have been transcribed with the text available online.

The guide was finalized in consultation with Dr. Christopher Cameron of UNC Charlotte and Dr. Jean O'Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) of the University of Minnesota, two of the foremost experts respectively on African American and Indigenous experience in the colonial American mileue. It continues to be a work in progress, intended to evolve as more digitized collections are added to Hidden Histories.

The Congregational Library & Archives, while it certainly holds outsized significance for researchers and genealogists, is nonetheless a relatively small nonprofit institution. The fact that we were able to produce this guide on a relative shoestring via targeted networking and top-down prioritization of staff time is encouraging. My hope is that our guide might inspire other small and mid-sized cultural institutions to produce similar research tools. Such highlighting of historically marginalized communities is the low-hanging fruit of the heritage sector, and frankly a bare minimum, but it's at least one place to start.

by Jules Thomson, Associate Archivist & Social Media Manager

Taking my cue from Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Past, and because I am decidedly not a subject specialist, I want to highlight pieces that some of our former, significantly more knowledgeable, bloggers have written about Christmas in the Congregational tradition. 

Did the Puritans celebrate Christmas?

The first "blog of Christmas past" is this 2011 essay by our former Executive Director and historian, Peggy Bendroth, in which she discusses the oft-maligned Puritan "ban" on Christmas. Given the contemporary allegations of a War on Christmas, it's interesting to consider that the Puritans were perhaps its most staunch footsoldiers.

Dr. Bendroth doesn't exactly refute the church fathers' aversion to celebration of the holiday (for an example, see this Cotton Mather sermon with a very long name) but she does attempt to contextualize their scroodgeyness as both an exhortation to spiritual piety, and as a reaction against the remarkable excesses of the Anglican court.

With its prodding of stereotypes, the essay is similar to our recent "myth busting" episodes around the Thanksgiving holiday, the Mayflower Compact, and modern misconceptions about the Puritans (coming soon!).

Congregational Christmas stories of the Gilded Age

Reader, I was floored by this 2015 essay, courtesy of Norman Erlendson and Joanna Albertson-Grove, in which they examine two childrens' Christmas stories published by The Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society in the 1890s. 

Excerpts from the two amusing tales demonstrate "how the prevailing Gilded Age values of individual virtue and personal piety were woven into Christian stories for children". This philosophy was a reaction to, and rejection of, the concept of the Social Gospel, in which Christians were considered responsible for the betterment of society.

If A Christmas Carol, published several decades earlier in 1843, falls into this latter category with its implied critique of prisons, workhouses, and unchecked capitalist greed, the Congregational Sunday-School stories are decidedly anti-Dickensian in spirit, emphasizing personal salvation over social reform, charity and trickle-down largesse over systemic change. I can't be the only one who sees some modern relevance to these competing philosophies beyond their legacy within Congregationalism - demonstrating once again the CLA slogan that "History Matters," even history as encapsulated in a whimsical book of childrens' Christmas stories.

by William McCarthy, Processing and Reference Archivist

While the staff of the CLA have been working from home, we have continued to remain engaged with our collections even while separated from them. These posts will highlight some of our less well-known collections. Please note that the collections highlighted are not available online unless otherwise noted.

Today I want to highlight RG4936, the Cranston, Rhode Island, Knightsville-Franklin Congregational Church records; 1807, 1863-2008. The collection was donated by the church in April 2010 with additional materials arriving in December 2011. The collection was first processed in July of 2010 and updated in January 2012.

The Knightsville Meetinghouse was built in 1807 for the Benevolent Baptist Society in Cranston, Rhode Island. The meetinghouse was not only used for the society, but also served as the town meeting center. Around 1864, the Knightsville Mission Sabbath School was established and started to thrive quickly. Members of the school decided to organize into a church. In 1878, the organization officially became a branch of the Union Congregational Church of Providence, Rhode Island. Following a merger between Union Congregational and Plymouth Congregational Church in 1928, Knightsville Congregational Church officially became its own entity. The membership base started to grow, along with many auxiliary groups. The Franklin Congregational Church, founded in 1873, started to share minister Paul E. Duhamel in 1964 due to declining membership. The two groups officially merged in 1967, forming the Knightsville-Franklin Congregational Church. The community continued to see decline throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. In 2006, the members voted to leave the United Church of Christ and join the National Association for Congregational Christian Churches. The members voted to close the church in 2009 and officially ended in October 2009.

The collection is split into 9 different series across 11 boxes. Series 1, Governance, contains annual reports, committee reports, and other records dealing with church activities and decision making. Series 2 covers the financial records as early as 1863. Series 3 contains records related to the ministers, mostly focused on the church's search for new ministers. Series 4 is all about membership and contains an index card list, transfers, and a remembrance book. Series 5 chronicles the auxiliary organizations such as a women's club, the Fellowship Club, and the Sunday School. Series 6 contains published materials such as order of worships, pamphlets, and newsletters. Series 7 has historical material which covers anniversaries, certificates, and historical notes. Series 8 covers photos and has a videocassette from the 1994 Rhode Island conference. The final series is all about the dissolution of the church from 2009. As you can see, the collection has a wide variety of highlights that would be interesting to all our patrons!

The legacy finding aid for this collection can be found HERE. If you have any interest in viewing this collection once the library reopens, or you have any other CLA related questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us at ref@14beacon.org. Stay safe and have a great day!

by Zachary Bodnar, Archivist

Work on the CLA’s pamphlet for starting a church records program continues apace, though slowly. One of the topics that will be covered in that pamphlet will be role of digital records in a records program and how to preserve those records. Digital preservation is a tough topic to crack though, especially when so much of the discussion surrounding digital preservation is either impractical, mired in hyper-specific terminology, or both. The diagram pictured here is of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model. I am not going to go into it (I’ve largely pictured it because there is a running joke in the field that all discussions of digital preservation must ultimately picture this model) but I do show it as a segue into saying that even large, well-funded, institutions with mature digital programs struggle to adhere fully to the OAIS model.

What then is the point in talking about digital preservation if even the biggest places run into difficulties? While it is true that digital preservation, at the highest level, is difficult, it does not mean that digital preservation at any level is impractical. Too often I have seen an emphasis in the field on “perfect preservation.” This need for some perfect solution tends to eat up resources, such as money and time, that could have been better spent on something smaller that provides imperfect, but achievable, digital preservation. And that kind of practical digital preservation is what the CLA hopes to offer churches.

For starters, let us clear up one very common misconception related to digital preservation. Paper is still the most secure, stable, and cost-effective preservation medium in the archives. Digital files are prone to corruption and bit-loss, stored on carrier mediums which regularly fail (such as compact disks, flash drives, and hard drives), and digital storage is expensive, especially at scale. Therefore, the CLA never suggests for churches to actively digitize their own physical records for preservation. As a field, digitization has moved away from “digitization for preservation” towards “digitization for access.” In other words, when archivists digitize something nowadays, it is typically done to mediate access to the resource, for example, by making digital images of a physical object available online for everyone with an internet connection to see. For a basic records program at a church, digitization will often make more headaches than solve problems.

While the CLA does not ever suggest churches digitize their own paper-based records, we also do not suggest mass-printing digital materials onto paper. While it is true that paper is a great preservation medium, it conversely does not make sense to be printing out every email and PDF for the sake of preservation. It may make sense to have physical surrogates for particularly important digital files, such as any digital documents related to church governance, but for the vast majority of digital records, having a physical version can lead to confusion and takes up space, a commodity often in short supply.

So how can churches preserve their digital records? There are a few practical and easy to implement decisions that can make digital preservation easier. From a policy perspective the first step is to have a committee. The CLA always recommends that a church records program be operated by a committee and either the full committee can participate in digital preservation or it can be handled by a sub-committee. At their best, committees ensure that institutional knowledge is not lost, even if its members change over time, and that contiguous knowledge is the absolute most important thing for a successful records program.

The committee should first determine and document the genres of digital records the church regularly creates, the file types of those digital records, where those records are stored, and who creates them. For example, it is important to identify that the church admin regularly creates minutes for the weekly church administration committee and that these records are made using Microsoft Word and stored on a local file directory on the church admin’s office computer. Think of this as an audit. This does not need to be a full accounting of every single digital files created, but it should cover, in broad swaths, records which are created regularly.

Once there is a sufficient accounting of the types and forms of digital records being created, the next step is to determine the lifecycle of these records. As a committee, decide which genres of digital records do not need to be preserved and therefore shouldn’t be transferred to a digital archive, which must be maintained for a time for legal reasons but should be destroyed after a certain time, and which should be considered important for the archival records and transferred to permanent storage after a time. If these kinds of determinations sound similar, it is because it is the same set of suggestions given to records programs for physical records. As such, the National Council of Nonprofits “Document Retention Policies for Nonprofits” can become a solid foundation upon which to think about managing digital records.

On to the task of preserving digital records, one of the first tasks after the initial audit should be to create a physical digital archive that exists separate from your church’s existing digital architecture. The greatest danger to digital files is hardware failure, such as the hard drive of an office computer failing. By purchasing an external hard drive, one can create an archived file repository that is separate from the standard office environment. To make the external hard drive even more secure, consider purchasing a watertight lockbox, depositing it into a safety deposit box at your church’s bank, or keeping it within a fire-safe vault in the church if you already have one. If funds are available, consider having two external hard drives, each an exact duplicate of the other, and storing them in different locations, such as one in the safe and the other at the bank. The initial ingest of files onto the external hard drive, using the audit as a base, will be the most time consuming task; once that is complete the church records committee should meet regularly, probably between 2-4 times a year, to determine which newly created files should be added to the hard drive and ensure that the device still functions. Unfortunately, even external hard drives can fail, so plan to acquire a new external hard drive every five years or so to be safe (though lightly used hard drives should last at least 10 years before any real danger of failure).

Another policy initiative that a church can undertake is to regularly convert old permanent files which are unlikely to be edited or modified in the future. While Microsoft’s Office suit is ubiquitous, it, and other similar office programs, are proprietary and the files they create are not guaranteed to be accessible in the future. Fortunately, most office programs allow you to save a file as a pdf, which is an acceptable and standard archival format for digital preservation. This conversion can be done before files are transferred to the external hard drive but should at minimum be done annually to help prevent backlogs and minimize the risk of any files suddenly becoming unsupported due to new software versions.

One final bit of advice would be to figure out a way to collect digital content from church members. Church events are the lifeblood of church communities, and they bring with them a plethora of records, many of them digital nowadays. The greatest bulk of these records might be videos and images taken on cell phones, but even the files created in preparation of the event, such as fliers, pamphlets, and programs, are likewise important records. Collections of these kinds of records can be done passively by setting up an email or a cloud-based Dropbox account specifically designed for collecting community records. With a particularly active community and records committee, churches could even organize events where community members volunteer their time and knowledge to tag digital photographs with the names of the people pictured in them. In general, outreach to the entire church community should be an important and regular part of the records committee’s work.

A lot has been covered in this post, and perhaps much of it not in the depth the topic requires, but I hope it can at least be a starting point to thinking about digital preservation. Digital records are here to stay and must be thought of as equal in importance to physical records. Ensuring their preservation is incredibly important to the future of a church’s community as they hold the memories of the present day. This is even more true now with COVID where many church activities have, like in much of society, become remote and digital. If ever there was a time to begin thinking about how your church can best manage and maintain its digital records, now is that time. And of course, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us via email!
Speaking of email! One absolute final bit of advice: do not worry about preserving emails. As much as it is talked about in the field, email preservation is neither practicable nor useful for basically any non-government entity.

By Jules Thomson, Associate Archivist / Social Media Manager

Adapted from an article originally published in the CLA’s September 2019 Bulletin

Who invented the internet? (No, not Al Gore!) You may have heard of Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee, usually hailed as the founding fathers of the World Wide Web. But if you answered "a Jesuit priest named Roberto Busa" you also wouldn’t be wrong.

Father Busa was an Italian linguist and seminarian, who studied Theology at the Episcopal Seminary of Belluno - along with Albino Luciani, later known as Pope John Paul I. But Busa is best known as the creator of the Index Thomisticus, a vast digital database of the works of the prolific Saint Thomas Aquinas. In this role, he also pioneered experimental applications of digital technology which would become foundational to the internet as we experience it today.

In 1949 at the Papal Gregorian University of Rome, Busa published a PhD thesis on Aquinas; but it wasn’t until his collaboration with the top brass at IBM, 30 years later, that he was able to convert decades of linguistic research into a dynamic database using emergent computing and internet technology. It was the first time in history that a humanities project had been subject to organization and analysis by computer algorithms. One of the abilities unique to this technology, and crucial for analyzing the works of Aquinas in particular, was its allowance for lemmatisation - grouping together different forms of a word to allow analysis as a single item. Another obvious advantage was the ability to share the database, first across local area networks and eventually globally through the World Wide Web.

The project is widely hailed as the first to introduce digital computing to the humanities – or vice versa, depending on how you look at it - so much so that a Roberto Busa Prize has been established by the international umbrella organization for humanities computing, ADHO, to recognize “outstanding lifetime achievements in the application of information and communications technologies to humanistic research”. Index Thomisticus both anticipated and typified what would later come to be known as "digital humanities", an ever-expanding field marrying the potential of digital technology with history, linguistics, sociology, and the arts.

Nigh on 40 years later, digital humanities (also known as DH) is more popular than ever. One has only to dip a toe into the world of grant-writing to understand that the phrase itself, for better or worse, is veritable currency. A combination of access potential, perceived value for money, and perceived digital preservation of data has contributed to an all-embracing attitude on the part of granting bodies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2018 the NEH awarded the fourth largest share of its funds specifically to DH projects, after federal/state partnership funding, programming, and general preservation and access.  And to quote the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “activities with a substantial digital component receive funds under all NEH program areas, thus the percentage of funds allocated to ODH understates the share of monies NEH invests in digital projects and materials.” [emphasis mine].

Few technological advancements throughout recorded history have rivalled that of computing and the internet. As far as the arts and humanities are concerned, the last innovation of equal magnitude was the invention of the printing press. And as was the case in the 15th century, it behooves scholars, historians and information professionals to align with popular media as a means to preserve and promote their work. The Darwinian model, when applied outside of the field of evolutionary science for which it was solely intended, is notoriously problematic. But the ‘change or die’ aphorism is nonetheless demonstrably relevant in the world of business and technology, in which new innovations must keep pace with evolving formats and public expectations. By now, models of commercial technology have permeated academia, information science, and the heritage sector to such an extent that the demarcations between them are increasingly blurry. Faceted search algorithms pioneered by the likes of Amazon have been put to use in public library catalogues. Museums are ‘gamifying’ their collections with 3D modelling, VR headsets, and augmented reality. The science of analyzing and improving user experience (known as UX) is increasingly indispensable in the public sector as well as the private.

Far from being left in the dust, Father Busa’s work continues to resonate today. His harnessing of lemmatization, the grouping of differently-inflected words together, anticipated a wider need for embedded, machine-readable iterations of human-readable text. (i.e., hidden code behind the words you see on the page, which accomplishes all sorts of functions). There are as many reasons why this might be desirable as there are digital humanities projects, but they commonly include semantic grouping of related words and phrases, and the ability to search across non-standardized spellings. The latter are, of course, extremely common in manuscripts dating from before the 20th century. These functions assist not only with research and analysis but also with accessibility, as they facilitate search and retrieval within host websites, and discoverability on search engines such as Google.

The encoding itself is largely accomplished through the process of XML tagging. Most people have at least heard of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the primary language of the web, designed to display text. XML (Extensible Markup Language), contrastingly, is the semantic, machine-readable encoding hidden behind the textual web, which allows for dynamic organization as well as mere display. In simple terms, it works by attaching “tags” to visible text which describe the meta-categories to which the text belongs, allowing for analysis and regrouping based on these. There are some immediately obvious applications, such as interactive websites and databases, whose functionality is built upon the language’s dynamism.

XML is extensible – meaning that infinite iterations of it can be tailor-made for any project. In the digital humanities field, one of the most important iterations is TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) format, which is utilized primarily by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation. Notable examples include the Folger Shakespeare Library, which has used TEI in its Folger Digital Texts project to lemmatize words across different versions of Shakespeare’s manuscripts, and the Library of Congress’s American Memory project which used a simplified form of TEI to encode a wide array of archival material types. A related schema was developed for the encoding of musical scores (MEI – Music Encoding Initiative format) which has enabled machine-reading of music archives, recently applied to the works of Beethoven and Delius, as well as a large corpus of mediaeval sheet music.

Busa’s methodology also spawned an array of lauded pioneer projects in the decades after the development of his Index, largely in the fields of literature and history. These include the Walt Whitman Archive, the Slave Societies Digital Archive, and the Emily Dickinson Archives, among many others. In addition to textual analysis, these projects also allowed for the virtual confederation of historical materials physically housed in diverse locations – a revolutionary hallmark of the field, now largely taken for granted.

Today the web is littered with other examples, large and small, including dynamic literary compendiums, image libraries, interactive historical mapping projects, visualizations, phone apps, and crowdsourcing projects. You will also find masses of scholarly articles and publications discussing the potential merits and issues inherent to the field, and several degree programs in the subject at universities such as UC Berkeley and Tufts. Some DH projects explore and confederate myriad works or subjects. Sometimes the same subjects or creators are revisited in different ways. Increasingly, the detailed textual encoding which typified early projects is expanding to allow for analysis of “big data”, i.e. wider patterns and trends, and “linked data”, expanding access across subject siloes to allow for a more holistic, big-picture understanding of a given topic.

The quote “hominem unius libri timeo” - I fear the man of a single book - is often attributed to Thomas Aquinas. The phrase has variously been interpreted as either critical or supportive of single-minded subject expertise (with ‘fear’ sometimes denoting reverence rather than admonition). Perhaps, in the world of digital humanities, both meanings apply equally. Father Busa’s Thomistic research was the result of decades of intensely focused academic study. And yet, without his interdisciplinary foray into the brave new world of computer science, the Index Thomisticus would have existed only in the confines of a few bound paper volumes, infinitely less dynamic and accessible, and – more importantly – its creator would not have spawned a global movement which continues to evolve new iterations and potentials today.

It is this marriage of academic rigor with the expansive potential of the digital world that typifies digital humanities as an emergent field, allowing knowledge previously encased in academic silos and physically static archives to be shared more easily with other institutions and simultaneously broadcast to the public at large. At their most successful, these projects breathe new life into the documentary and material record, recreate and enhance our knowledge and understanding of history, and bring it, with all its surprises and idiosyncrasies, into the limelight as never before.

 

Sources

Bonzio, Roberto. “Father Busa, Pioneer of Computing in Humanities with Index Thomisticus, Dies at 98.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, August 19, 2011. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertobonzio/2011/08/11/father-busa-pionee....

“Distribution of NEH Program Funding.” Humanities Indicators. Accessed August 14, 2019. https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=76.

"Emily Dickinson, From Fascicle to Open Access | Harvard University Press". www.hup.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2016-12-26.. See Emily Dickinson Archive website

Mary Loeffelholz. "Networking Dickinson: Some Thought Experiments in Digital Humanities." The Emily Dickinson Journal 23, no. 1 (2014): 106-119. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed August 14, 2019).

Priego, Ernesto. “Father Roberto Busa: One Academic's Impact on HE and My Career.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, August 12, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2011/aug/12/fa....

Projects and users. Accessed August 14, 2019. https://music-encoding.org/community/projects-users.html.

“Slave Societies Digital Archive.” Slave Societies Digital Archive. Accessed August 14, 2019. https://www.slavesocieties.org/.

“TEI: Projects Using the TEI.” TEI Text Encoding Initiative. Accessed August 14, 2019. https://tei-c.org/activities/projects/.

“The Walt Whitman Archive.” The Walt Whitman Archive. Accessed August 14, 2019. http://www.whitmanarchive.org./.

He who ne’er learns his A, B, C, for ever will a Blockhead be;/ But he who to his Book’s inclin’d, will soon a golden Treasure find

So begins the earliest edition of The New-England Primer in the library’s collection, printed in Boston some time in the 1780’s. As Zack mentioned in his recent post, the staff here just recently finished reading and discussing Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen. It seemed fitting, then, to take another look at America’s first textbook.

The first edition of the Primer was printed in Boston in the late 1680’s by Benjamin Harris who was also the likely author of the alphabetic couplets it is known for today; however, the first known extant copy of the Primer was printed in 1727. Unlike today’s history textbooks, copies of the Primer were treasured by their owners and often loved to death which is why so few early editions survive. Our earliest copy, printed nearly a century after the first Primer, bears this out: the pages are so worn in places they’re barely legible. You can imagine how many different fingers have turned these pages over the last 300 years.

1727 was also about the time that the Primer began to take its most familiar form. First, general literacy instruction: the alphabet, wordlists of variable syllable lengths, alphabetized couplets and the woodcuts to go with them. Many editions also included the Lord’s Prayer and John Cotton’s catechism “Spiritual Milk for Babes” as well as Isaac Watts’ “Divine Songs” became standard inclusions in later editions. As with contemporary textbooks, political and cultural shifts in society were reflected in changes to the content of the Primer. After the American Revolution, references to the king were removed and his portrait was replaced with one of George Washington. Some editions had lines like “The British King lost states thirteen” added into the text. Periods of religious revival saw editions that included more prayers and hymns.

There are hundreds of different editions of The New-England Primer, all with slight variations, including five in the library’s collection spanning the years from 1780? to 1849. As with the textbooks of today, the Primer reflects the beliefs and opinions of its authors and the culture in which it was produced. Puritans had always been very concerned with their children’s education and the emphasis on literacy instruction at the beginning of each Primer reflects this. Before one could read the Bible, one had to learn to read, after all. The puritan concern with the world to come also features prominently in the text. Barely a page goes by without the reader being reminded of their own mortality with lines like: “time cuts down all/ both great and small”. This might seem morbid to us today, but it’s indicative of the importance placed on education: it was necessary to save one’s soul.

Our recent reading shows the ways in which our educational texts are still attempting to inculcate certain values, though, as the author empahsizes, which values those are is worth further examination. No one is carrying around their high school history textbook until it falls apart, unless it’s the same book that’s been assigned for the last two decades. Certainly, The New-England Primer benefitted from relatively little competition when it came to children’s entertainment, but given the importance of the study of history (especially when the chances of repeating seem alarmingly high), finding something that speaks to children in the same way can only help.

While the staff of the CLA have been working from home, we have continued to remain engaged with our collections even while separated from them. These posts will highlight some of our less well-known collections. Please note that the collections highlighted are not available online unless otherwise noted.

Today’s highlight will be RG5332, the Churchmen’s League records, 1940-1989. This collection found its way to the Congregational Library and Archives through a gift from Andover Newton Theological Seminary in 2017. The collection was processed by one of our archivists in 2018.

The Churchman’s League was an organization created for the purpose of promoting programs of study, research, education, legislation, and action. Their work was dedicated to raising the values of civic righteousness, social justice, moral decent and an overall better life for society. They used meetings, readings, discussions, and more to promote these goals. The organizationformed sometime around 1940 and by the 1960s was often referred to simply as “The League”. In 1963, the Churchman’s League expanded its original structure and opted to become three organizations wrapped into one. These new branches were the Massachusetts Temperance League, Lord’s Day League, and the Churchman’s League for Civic Welfare.

This collection is one worth highlighting because it showcases how an organization dedicated todirect change in society went about learning, spreading, and defending its message. The first series covers the wide topics of interest that the group sought to confront. These topics include blasphemy, alcoholism, court reform, prison reform, divorce, poverty and more. Each one of these topics has a dedicated folder which contains information about the League’s stance, efforts to increase awareness of their stance, and ways to turn the stances into concrete politicalaction. Another area of interest to the league was the status of religiosity, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In this area, the focus is less on action and more on learning and understanding the current realities of religion in the United States.

The next two series deal with the operations of the Churchman’s League from an organizational and financial sense. Beyond basic finances, the collection has contributor lists, the creation of various funds, reports and tracking of office rentals. On the organizational side, the collection has a nearly complete run of meeting minutes and annual reports from the 1950s through the 1980s. While it was not possible to completely ascertain when the League officially disbanded, this collection’s meeting minutes and reports end in 1989.

The last part of the collection worth highlighting focuses on letters, handouts and newsletters which served as the League’s outward attempt to gain support for their positions. This includes letters to state and federal politicians, pamphlets on various League campaigns, and newsletters which describe their activities from 1976-1989.

This collection is one worth highlighting because of the amount of information related to the Churchman’s League and their activities. It also provides a snapshot into how a religious organization thought and tackled a variety of different political issues. The collection will greatly serve future researchers and hopefully sooner rather than later!

The finding aid for this collection can be found HERE. If you have any interest in viewing this collection once the library reopens, or you have any other CLA related questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us at ref@14beacon.org. Stay safe and have a great day!

by Jules Thomson, Assistant Archivist / NEHH Publication

Improving access to resources is the perennial mission of librarians and archivists, and to that end the Congregational Library & Archives has been working on expanding our finding guide for records relating to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color within our 17th-19th century collections, particularly those digitized as part of New England's Hidden Histories. (The new guide is in review and will be made available shortly). While collating and describing these records, many of them added only recently to NEHH, I've personally gained more insight into the shifting contexts of church attendence by people of color in colonial and antebellum America. In particular, I have been struck by the major social and religious changes pursuant to slavery's abolition in New England after the 1780s, including the splitting off of congregants of color to form their own religious communities in the wake of discrimination and sidelining within majority-white churches.

A prime example of this trend was the formation of the Abyssinian Church and Religious Society in Portland, Maine - the Abyssinian was one of six Black Congregational churches founded prior to the Civil War (along with the Dixwell Avenue Church in New Haven, CT, the Talcott Street Church in Hartford, CT, the African Union Congregational Church in Newport, RI, the Second Church of Pittsfield, MA, and the Black church in Springfield, MA). The Abyssinian Church was organized by disaffected parishioners of the Second Congregational Church in Portland, whose majority-white congregation had relegated Black members to segregated balcony seating as well as general hostility and racial animus.

We know that congregants suffered these inequities because six Black members of the Second Church (Christopher Christian Manuel, Reuben Ruby, Caleb Jonson, Clement Thomson, Job L. Wentworth, and John Siggs) wrote a letter of complaint to the local Eastern Argus newspaper in 1826 in which they described the ill treatment. Two years later in 1828, these six signatories along with sixteen other disaffected members petitioned the State Legislature for permission to incorporate their own religious society. The state granted the request, allowing for the formation of the Abyssinian Religious Society. Other congregants of color from the area soon joined with the new Society, including a delegation from the Fourth Congregational Church in Portland. This merger expanded the organization into the Abyssinian Congregational Church and Society.

Besides being an exemplar of the context in which it was founded, the Abyssinian Church and Society was a historical juggernaut in its own right, acting as a cultural nexus for the Black community in Maine for many decades. It hosted worship and revivals, abolition and temperance meetings, several local societies, and a school for Portland's Black children until integration in 1856. Lectures and concerts were also commonplace, though the church meeting minutes include an amusing prohibition against attending "dancing theaters and sirkices [sic]" - perhaps indicating that such jollity was rife amidst the congregation.

The church hosted some of the foremost abolitionists in the country such as Frederick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison, and was also one of the most northerly stops on the Underground Railroad, assisting refugees' passage into Canada. In the aftermath of the Civil War, famed abolitionist James W. C. Pennington served for three years as pastor of the church.

Local benefactor Reuben Ruby looms large in the history of the Abyssinian. He provided the land upon which the meeting house was to be built, was central to its founding and administration, and facilitated the organization's role in the Underground Railroad. Mr. Ruby worked directly with William Lloyd Garrison, and supported the start of Freedom's Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States. He was well known in Portland, partly because he was owner and operator of two "hack stands", horse-drawn taxi ranks. Ruby's son William played a crucial role in alerting the city to Portland's Great Fire of 1866, and in protecting the meeting house from ruin; he fittingly went on to captain the local fire department in addition to other civic roles.

The Abyssinian Church closed its doors in the early 20th century, partly due to the tragic wreck of the steamship Portland in November of 1898, in which seventeen of the church's male parishioners died. Most of the remaining congregation became members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, now known as the Green Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church. The former meeting house on Newbury Street was subsequently converted to tenement housing and fell into disrepair, but a process of restoration began in the late 1990s, and the building has now been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The Abyssinian Church and Society record books are the only records from a pre-Civil War Black Congregational church which are viewable online. They have been made available in cooperation with our partners at the Maine Historical Society and the Digital Ark Corporation, and with generous support from the Council on Library and Information Resources via their Digitizing Hidden Collections grant.

by Sara Trotta, Librarian

For many people, history seems to come to us pre-packaged: in textbooks, or Ken Burns documentaries, or brick-like presidential biographies written by Ron Chernow. But this belies all the work that goes into the creation of history--the tracking down of sources, the sense-making and interpretation, the creation of a cohesive narrative, and the time spent assembling the necessary background knowledge that makes all of this possible. Diving into primary sources like the ones in our collection can be intimidating. It can be hard to know where to start and harder still to be sure you aren’t missing some necessary context.

Political cartoons in particular have a wealth of information and provide an entertaining window into common political and social discourse, but can be difficult to interpret without a lot of background information. Not dissimilar from modern internet memes that are constantly in conversation with one another and dependent on niche cultural references. If you missed the joke in the first round, trying to decipher it centuries later seems nigh impossible. They may have visual references that would be very meaningful to contemporary audiences but which are opaque today. For example, 18th century political cartoons often feature images of dogs urinating on things--sometimes the meaning is easily discerned, as when the dog is peeing on a tea caddy in a Revolutionary War-era cartoon, but it can also be a more general symbol of disorder. There are many cartoons where the conflicts are so specific or the references so obscure that they are nearly impenetrable for modern audiences. This type of allusive commentary can make for difficult analysis and require a depth of contextual knowledge to really make sense of them.

We have a good example of this in our collection in the cover illustration pictured above. Who is that man? Why is he in a baking pan? And what’s a dough-face anyway? By sheer luck, I got the joke. I was very fortunate to have an excellent High School history (Hello, Mr. Wagner!) whose lively lectures and passion for the subject matter still stick with me today. Once we got to the Civil War, we talked a lot about the “doughfaced wusses” and in particular, the biggest dough-faced wuss of them all, President James Buchanan. Originally, the term “Doughface” referred to someone, usually a politician who had no strong principles of their own, who was pliable and moldable like dough. Over time the term came to refer specifically to Northern politicians who capitulated to the demands of Southern slave-holding senators. In fact, the origin of this phrase may have actually been “doe-faced” referring to the cowardice displayed by these wishy-washy men which was misheard and written down incorrectly. Though the pamphlet itself would probably provide some context, understanding what the pamphlet was about at a glance would be very difficult. The contextual information needed to understand material like this can come from a variety of places and take years to build up--there are new discoveries to be made and nuances to be uncovered all the time, even for experienced researchers.

The Congregational Library welcomes researchers at all skill levels, and we have multiple tools available to provide scaffolding for people exploring primary resources for the first time. Staff are on hand to explain things like how to safely handle historical documents and provide physical assistance like book cradles or weights if necessary. We can also tell you what information you’re likely to find in what sorts of records. The collection at the library also has a wealth of secondary sources specifically intended to help support primary source research in the collection. Part of the process of describing items and collections is researching their historical context. Archivists add historical notes and other information to finding aids for thise reason. Staff are knowledgeable and keen to offer their expertise and if we don’t know the answer to your question, we’ll find someone who does.

By Zachary Bodnar, Archivist

Now that the staff of the Congregational Library & Archives are back in our offices, or in my case temporarily holed up in the executive director’s office with it’s beautiful view of Beacon Street (oh woe is me), we have been able to resume our acquisitions workflows and accept new donations of archival and library materials. Collecting, to preserve and make accessible, is a key component of our mission. Indeed, a significant portion of our time during the pandemic has been to work on developing and refining a comprehensive collection policy for the CLA. And to return to this key component of our work once again after the long pause due to COVID has been a balm to my archivist soul.

My recent work with the Digital Asset Management System selection project has recently gotten me thinking about how we work with potential donors of archival materials though. We have a comprehensive collection policy that ensures the full preservation of a person, church, or organization’s memory. However, the way we have presented this list of material types has been format agnostic. For example, when communicating with organizations, we would make clear that we will take “Building records: such as blueprints, pew plans and pew deeds, assessors records, and records related to construction/renovation” without reference to the physical medium that these records appear on.

For most of the above listed record types, the first thing that comes to mind is likely something physical. Perhaps you imagine a record book containing meeting minutes related to the maintenance of the building or a large blueprint documenting the construction of a new addition. But the fact is that all these records can just as easily be digital and stored on a computer's hard drive!

Most records that are produced today by individuals or organizations are born-digital, meaning they were created in a digital format. As an extreme illustration of this fact, in 2013 the US Government Printing Office estimated that 97% of federal records produced were born digital (Jacobs, James A, 2014). Even organizations and persons who have been slower to adopt digital technologies are seeing larger percentages of their annual records become born-digital. Photographs from the annual BBQ taken on a cell phone, emails between committee members, the meeting minutes recorded in notepad, the PowerPoint presentation from the last board meeting, and the word document produced during the creation of this blog post are all examples of born-digital records. As an ever-increasing percentage of records are produced digitally, archivists must grapple with how to collect these records, as they are just as crucial to the preservation of memory as that physical record book from 1874.

For now, there are two immediate steps, and the CLA has already begun to do both. First happens at the point of contact with potential donors. Recently rewritten procedures ensure that when talking to donors, we more actively inquire and seek out born-digital materials. We want to ensure that no part of a church’s memory is lost because it was stored on a hard drive instead of in a file cabinet.  And second, the CLA is pursuing a Digital Asset Management System which will allow for the CLA to provide unparalleled access to the born-digital materials we have. The collection of born-digital materials means nothing if we cannot also make the materials accessible to our users, and the DAMS will do exactly that.

For better and worse, the future of archives is inextricably linked to the digital realm. We cannot say we collect, preserve, and make accessible the memories of Congregationalism if we do not collect, preserve, and make accessible digital records. Fortunately, the CLA is ready for this next step, and already working to make the incoming deluge of digital materials accessible for everyone, online and on location.

by William McCarthy, Processing and Reference Archivist

While the staff of the CLA have been working from home, we have continued to remain engaged with our collections even while separated from them. These posts will highlight some of our less well-known collections. Please note that the collections highlighted are not available online unless otherwise noted.

Today’s highlight will be MS0914, the Loy and Edna Long missionary papers, 1929-1968. In 2010, staff members working on an inventory project came across this unprocessed, previously unknown collection. It was immediately accessioned and processed into the collection we have today.

The focus of the collection is on the Long’s three separate trips to India which took place between 1931-1946 and 1949-1956. Much of their time in India was spent working in Ahmednagar. Loy was a social and industrial welfare worker and organized the Probation and After-Care Association. (1) Scattered through the collection are news bulletins called “The Long’s Broadcast” which goes into detail about the work they were doing and events they saw in Ahmednagar. As an example, the January 1938 edition discusses the work of Mahatma Gandhi, Loy’s work starting the City Games Association, his work with their charity organization, and the local neighborhood house they manage.

In the same broadcast, Edna Long describes the origins of her work with sisal fibre and ropemaking. Edna, on a trip to the market, finds a large set of sisal fibres for sale in Ahmednagar and purchases them. She then worked with women in the community to help modernize the process of using the sisal fibre to make rope. She says that “We experimented together, sharing ideas, and in less than a month we discovered how to clean, dye, drain, spin and weave this hemp...within a remarkably short time these women were making beautiful, saleable articles, including purses, belts, luncheon sets, serviette rings, sandals and brushes.” The rest of the report chronicles how the work evolved from the initial 1938 broadcast into a consistent part of the Long’s lives. The information in these records should be explored as this is only the surface of what is available!
  
The legacy finding aid for this collection can be found HERE. If you have any interest in viewing this collection once the library reopens, or you have any other CLA related questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us at ref@14beacon.org. Stay safe and have a great day!

1. United Church of Christ's Whole Earth Newsletter, Spring 1979, p 14-15

by Jules Thomson, Assistant Archivist / NEHH Publication

I would be hard pressed to think of a more comprehensive Hidden Histories collection than that relating to Congregational and Separatist minister John Cleaveland (1722-1799). The digitized versions of his papers and sermons are provided in partnership with the Philips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, who hold the orginal documents.

Rev. Cleaveland's biography is fascinating in its own right. He chafed against religious orthodoxy and typified the revivalist spirit of the Great Awakening, earning him an expulsion from Yale and ultimately a successful career in the Chebacco parish of Ipswich (now Essex, Mass.), serving as pastor to both Separatist and orthodox congregations there. In addition to his regular ministerial career, Rev. Cleaveland lived through both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. He served as an army chaplain during both conflicts, first with British colonial forces, and later as an American revolutionary; Cleaveland was a notable patriot and exhorter of revolution from the pulpit, and father to four sons who served against the British. His story is both an intimate and universal example of shifting loyalties and identities during the formation of the United States.

In addition to these broad strokes, Rev. Cleaveland's papers reveal diverse aspects of 18th-century life in thrilling detail. These include an extensive array of correspondence, religious papers, biographical material, church administration, handwritten sermons, and relations of faith from local parishioners. Also included is a short diary by Rev. Cleaveland's first wife, Mary Cleaveland, in which she details the births of her children. Among the most notable historical records are documents related to Rev. Cleaveland's expulsion from Yale, a letter in which he urges the conversion of Native American peoples, and a sermon against British tyranny. Additionally there are a large number of financial and administrative records, offering glimpses into agricultural life and everyday provisions and payments in the 1700s. There are more personal, idiosyncratic records too; the most amusing to me personally is a loose collection of notes which include the "weight of the family of Rev. Cleaveland".

A substantial amount of records consist of correspondence between Rev. Cleaveland and his first wife, Mary (nee Dodge). A number of the letters between them predate the marriage, and comprise a somewhat fraught series of attempts by Rev. Cleaveland to convince Miss Dodge to marry him. Later, he wrote to her regularly while stationed with regiments at Lake George and Louisburg, Cape Breton during the French and Indian War.

Other records in the collection offer insights into local tensions in Cleaveland's eventual home parish of Chebacco (Essex). After the midcentury revivals of the Great Awakening, the Second Parish Church of Ipswich, under the pastorate of orthodox Congregationalist Rev. Theophilus Pickering, began losing members at an alarming rate. Rev. Cleaveland arrived in Chebacco in 1747 to minister to these evangelical defectors. Tensions between Rev. Pickering and Rev. Cleaveland escalated quickly. The resident minister wrote a scolding letter to "the gentleman stranger that is a minster at the house of Mr. James Eveleth". After this, the two became engaged in the 18th-century equivalent of a Twitter war, each writing letters of complaint and publishing pamphlets against the other. Rev. Cleaveland had the last laugh, as he went on to become minister of the Second Church in Ipswich in 1774, thus reuniting the two congregations.

The John Cleaveland Papers collection can be viewed in the New England's Hidden Histories portal, in additional to a collection of John Cleaveland Sermons.

Further Reading: 

Jedrey, Christopher M. The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England. Norton, 1979.

 

by Tom Clark, Library Director

I am lucky to have a family home in Rockport, MA on the ocean and have spent many a happy moment since childhood enjoying the seaside beauty of all of Cape Ann, located 30 miles north of Boston, including both the quaint, picturesque town of Rockport as well as neighboring Gloucester - the quintessential New England seaport. Both communities have a rich Congregational tradition starting with the original Gloucester parish in 1642 which spread to Rockport. Rockport’s beautiful Congregational Church with a towering steeple in the center of town, is noted for being fired upon by the British in the War of 1812. The church still has the cannonball.

But this blog is about Gloucester’s Second Parish, formed when members of the First Parish petitioned in 1712 to form their own parish due to geographical constrains of traveling from West Gloucester (the Annisquam River and many adjacent tidal salt marshes made travel difficult to West Gloucester). The Meeting House was built in 1713 and was located near what is today the intersection of Concord Street and Bray Street in West Gloucester. Though it was torn down in 1842, it still lives on for those willing to explore the beautiful woods of the Tompson Street Reservation (named after Rev. Samuel Tompson, the first Pastor of the Second Parish) with a Meeting House clearing and an overgrown, forested burial ground.

Besides the scenic coast of which Cape Ann is most known for, the interiors are full of beautiful, hilly, rocky forests. Shared between Rockport and Gloucester is an area known as Dogtown, an early settlement with a storied past which I will write about in a future blog. In West Gloucester, is the Tompson Street Reservation, with many hiking paths ranging from easy to challenging.

There is an entrance to the Reservation off Bray Street identified by a sign for “Old Thompson Street Second Parish, Circa 1700 Historic Walking Path.” This is known as The Old Tompson Cart Path and was well traveled from the early 18th century through the mid-19th century. Less than a ½ mile up hilly path you arrive at a clearing in the woods with signage and a cross with benches commemorating the Meeting House. This spot along the old cart path was once the location of the 15-acre site dedicated to the Second Parish. I noticed there were no stone walls in this area which shows that the surroundings were not for farming, grazing or ownership – but rather, a peaceful gathering spot for worship.

On the northern end of the Concord Street loop is an overgrown entrance with another sign for the “Old Thompson Street Second Parish.” There are stone walls along the old cart path that show territorial usage from years ago. The woods are quite dense, so it would be easy to miss the burial ground unless you keep an eye out for a new formation in the stone walls. When you see the stone walls forming an enclosure, careful inspection reveals slate slabs that turn out to be grave markers (remember…Cape Ann is strewn with rocks everywhere, so it’s not unusual to see rock croppings in the woods).

Entering the burial ground yields several scattered headstones in various states of disrepair, but some are still legible, honoring the departed. Findagrave lists all the stones that have been identified (including several which were removed). The most interesting of these is that of Deacon William Haskell which has survived a tree trunk growing around the headstone.

If you decide to take a walk in the woods on Cape Ann, please set aside time to visit the Cape Ann Museum which has many of the records from the Second Parish.

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Information for this blog was gathered from the following material in the Congregational Library Collection:

The Church in the Wilderness 1713 – 1988 by Carl F. Viator, in our West Gloucester Trinitarian Congregational Church collection

History of the Town of Gloucester, Cape Ann, Including the Town of Rockport by John J. Babson

Special thanks to Lise Breen, a Researcher, Writer and Gloucester Historian, and Jeff Cooper, New England Hidden Histories Program Director for sharing their historical knowledge of Second Parish.

by Jules Thomson, Assistant Archivist / NEHH Publications

Perhaps the most accurate thing one can say about the Salem witch trials is that our modern cultural understanding of them is plagued by inaccuracy. One such misconception is simple seasonality. Salem, both the town itself and the wider cultural concept, is now indelibly associated with Halloween, but the executions of the falsely-accused victims of the hysteria actually occured in the heat of the Massachusetts summer, from June to September, 1692.

An omnipresent darling of American folklore, the witch trials narrative is enjoying a notable resurgence ushered in with the publication of Stacy Schiff's The Witches, and, albeit on a less scholarly note, a plethora of TV shows including WGN's Salem, the Travel Channel's Witches of Salem, and Freeform's Motherland: Fort Salem. The latter features an alternate history in which the "witches" A) were actual witches, and B) shacked up with the local militia to provide supernatural assistance in battle, and seem to have subsequently been conscripted into the U.S. army.

I personally enjoy such whimsical adaptations and artistic license - Disney's Halloween classic Hocus Pocus remains one of my favorite films of all time - and censorship in the name of historical accuracy would be downright, well, Puritanical. However, I frequently find myself wondering how the events of 1692 have become so twisted in the American imagination. Outside of Massachusetts, the witch trials of the North Shore merit only a passing mention in the historical curriculum, high-school theater productions of The Crucible notwithstanding, allowing popular misinformation to flourish.

Sometimes misconception takes the form of conflation with the long-lived European trials, much more severe in both brutality and body count; although torture was also utilized in Salem, the total death toll was "only" 25. At the opposite end of the spectrum, supernatural powers continue to be attributed to the accused, who were in fact hapless victims of religious hysteria and score-settling, and mostly faithful church-goers. Not to mention the more subtle, but no less popular, proliferation of reductivist theories around the hysteria, like blaming the entire thing on moldy rye.

Popular scholarly tomes like Schiff's go some way toward redressing this balance. I am proud to say that the Congregational Library also played its part in advocating for better research and access, as part of the New England's Hidden Histories program. During CLIR-funded project work in 2016-17, we partnered with the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, digitizing and publishing their archival collections related to Congregationalism. Among these were a number of witchcraft trial records, which fall under the same nascent-Congregationalist category as other Puritan sources.

Unsurprisingly, PEM/Phillips holds a substantial portion of the legal documentation produced during the trials, including testimony and court transcripts, since the events occurred in their metaphorical backyard. (Others are held variously by the Boston Public Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Massachusetts Archives, Essex County Court Archives, Essex Institute, New York Public Library, and Maine Historical Society). Most of the Phillips Library trial records had already been digitized by the University of Virginia in 2002, as part of their comprehensive Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive project - even now the project website remains the "hub" for Salem witch trial research, a treasure trove of original records, transcriptions, and contextual information.

However, subsequent to UVA/PEM's digitization of the records in the early 2000s, several other trial documents were identified within the collections. These were the primary subject of the Hidden Histories digitization and publication scheme. In our Salem Witchcraft Trials collection page, we aligned our newly digitized records with UVA's digital library, filling in occasional gaps, and in some cases providing higher-resolution surrogates of previously digitized records. The resulting collection is the most complete roster of the PEM/Phillips trial documents available online.

I lately found myself returning to the primary-source narratives while listening to the audiobook of Schiff's The Witches, borrowed free-of-charge from my local library via the Libby smartphone app (FYI). For the second time since working with the digitized records, it struck me that the historical details of the trials and their supernatural testimonials are perhaps stranger than any modern re-imagining (yes, even Motherland: Fort Salem). Strolling along the Deer Island waterfront near my home in Winthrop, Mass. I can just glimpse the distant headlands of Salem and Marblehead, often overshadowed by dark pillars of cloud. On these blisteringly hot summer days, the events of 1692 seem very far away indeed. But the more I delve into the real story of Salem, the more I am reminded that these spectres of history are closer than we think, and certainly not relegated to Halloween alone.