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Nofes and Documents FIRST PUBLISHERS OF TRUTH IN NEW ENGLAND A COMPOSITE LIST, 1656-1775 By G. J. Willauer, Jr.* In the possession of the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends in Providence are eleven manuscript lists of Public Friends who began ministering there in 1656. They vary a good deal in content, but all of them give the name and date of the ministers' first visits to the area, which generally includes the present New England states and Long Island up to 1696. Seven are anonymous, and little is known about those that are signed except that one may have been started by Mary Brown, the second wife of Moses Brown. In general, these documents are comparable to lists kept by Friends elsewhere in the colonies, including several now in the Quaker Collection of the Haverford College Library and one in the Newport Historical Society archives.1 From time to time these registers have been published, either verbatim or as composites of several from one geographical area or collection. A familiar one, based on religious visits to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, is found in Isaac Sharpless' chapter on Pennsylvania in Rufus Jones' work, The Quakers in the American 'Department of English, Connecticut College. 1. They are James Bowden, The History of the Society of Friends in America (London, 1854), I, 29-308; II, 1-294; Lydia S. Hinchman, Early Settlers of Nantucket (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 317-330; Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (London, 1911), pp. 540-543; The Journal of the Friends Historical Society, X (July, 1913), 117-132; Edward Milligan, "Quaker Transatlantic Journeys" (Typescript in the Library of the Friends' House Library, London) ; "A Catalog of the ministering friends that have visited Nantucket from the Earliest history—with their companions," a manuscript in archives of the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends in Providence; an untitled manuscript list, covering the years 1656-1814, and in the possession of the Newport Historical Society; Frederick B. Tolles, The Atlantic Community of Early Friends, Journal of the Friends Historical Society, Supplement 24 (1952), 35-38; and Frederick B. Tolles, "The Transatlantic Quaker Community in the Seventeenth Century," Huntington Library Quarterly, XIV (May, 1951), 239-258. 35 36QUAKER HISTORY Colonies; and another, relating to Nantucket, is an appendix in Lydia S. Hinchman's book, Early Settlers of Nantucket. Frederick B. Tolles has compiled a list, taken from four printed sources, which appears in a supplement to the Journal of the Friends Historical Society; and Edward H. Milligan, Librarian at the Friends' House Library in London, is presently supervising a similar compilation , based on both printed and manuscript sources. Unfortunately , with the exception of the Nantucket list, there is none in print for New England as a whole. What follows, then, is a composite fist of all Public Friends from England and Ireland who visited New England between 1656 and 1775. It is based on the eleven manuscript registers in Providence and contains only names which appear in several of them. Just the Colonial Period is represented, and ministers from the other colonies, as well as the West Indies, are excluded. The ministers' English or Irish origin and official status have been verified by consulting the typescript in the Friends' House Library in London and a variety of lists, both manuscript and published, from other locales in the colonies. Substantiation has not always been easy, however, for a variety of reasons. For example, some of the ministers, such as Thomas Chalkley and Thomas Evenden, chose to live in the colonies in the course of their missions, and sources do not always give the date of settlement. Nor are there complete records of meetings' sanctions for such missions so that officiality of a tour is sometimes hard to determine. Spelling of names also differs widely from one manuscript to another. In each case the most commonly used date of visit to New England and spelling of name, as found in the lists, is given. At first it might seem that these registers, taken singly or in compilation, are unreliable sources of information. They are, after all, produced by amateurs, working without formal sanction or easy access to records. Many, moreover...

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