Will There Be a Quaker History?: A Concern for the Preservation of Yearly Meeting Records

Will There Be a Quaker History? A Concern for the Preservation ofYearly Meeting Records Patrick Ragains and Peter L. Steere* Quakermeetingrecords are amajor source forthehistoryofthe Society ofFriends. Many ofthese records are kept in libraries or Quakermeetinghouses , but others reside in largely uncontrolled environments and are inaccessible to meeting members, scholars, and other potential users. Although several authors, including Hamm, Peterson, Treadway and Fowler, have described the content of specific Quaker collections, no previous study has dealt with the overall condition of yearly meeting records. Our studywas undertakento analyze the preservation andrecords management practices of active yearly meetings in North America. Certainly most Friends would agree that yearly meeting records are important, but it will be useful to first point out some specific reasons for this. Yearly meeting records reveal Friends' evolving religious and social concerns, perhaps more clearly and succinctly than do the records of monthly meetings or other subordinate bodies. This point will receive further discussion below. Secondly, a legal needmay arise occasionally to consult meeting records, such as financial accounts, records of employment , and other business transactions. Another perspective—the historian's—advocates adequately recordingkeyevents andpreservingthese records forposterity. This is largelythe source ofour own interest, as we have foundmuchmaterial on contemporary Quakerism to be incomplete and scattered. In some cases, yearly meetings less than twenty years old are in danger oflosing large portions of their historical records, due to the lack ofproper records management and storage. Improved control and preservation ofQuaker yearly meeting archives would enable historians to write more adequate and balanced histories ofmodern Quakerism. There are presently only two book-length histories of Quakerism's growth in the western United States, Errol T. Elliott's Quakers on the American Frontier and David C. LeShana's Quakers in California. Aside from a few histories ofindividual meetings or other Friends' associations, little else has beenpublished onthe subject. Particularly, there is a lack ofpublished material on the recent history of unprogrammed meetings in the midwestern and western United States. In light of the founding of several new yearly meetings and changes in the nature of Quakerism's impact upon American culture there is a need to *Patrick Ragains is Assistant Professor and Government Information Librarian at Montana State University in Bozeman. Peter L. Steere is Manuscripts Librarian and Congressional Archivist for the papers ofMorris K. Udall, Special Collections Division of the University of Arizona Library. Will There Be a Quaker History?93 reexamine and expand upon earlier historical studies. Developments subsequent to the work done by Elliott and LeShana should be chronicled and viewed in relation to earlierperiods ofthe Quaker experience. This is almost impossible at the present time, due to the largely fugitive condition of recent Quaker documents. Few North American yearly meetings establishedinthis centuryhave depositedtheirrecords inresearchlibraries or other institutions prepared to preserve archival materials and provide adequate access to scholars. Friends' traditionally strong concern forrecording andpreserving their history isrootedinearlyQuakertheology. Friendswrote downtheirbeliefs and experiences in order to transmit the essence oftheir religion to future generations. This kind of documentation was needed to show that direct spiritual inspiration was still available to humanity. The meticulous keeping of journals and meeting minutes did more, however, than simply demonstratethe continuedpresenceandavailabilityofthe InnerLight. The written record of Quakerism soon became a corpus by which each new generation measured itself. Conformity was not sought as much as consistency and alignment with the thoughts and actions of the Society's great figures (such as George Fox, Margaret Fell, and John Woolman), whose experiences were almost always held to be both exemplary and spiritually genuine. Although early Quakers believed that contact with God could not be planned and wanted to remove all rituals from religious practice, the diaries and official records left by the Society's leadership defined the desirable attitudes toward worship and daily life very clearly. In this way much spiritual authority became vested in the writings ofFriends. Historically, the aspirations of a yearly meeting's leaders have been expressed in meeting records. Epistles and books of discipline have traditionally marked the limits of appropriate behavior, whether in the conduct ofone'spersonal life or in ameeting's relationto social concerns, such as in the treatment of prisoners, slaves, the mentally ill and other disenfranchisedmembers...