Minutes of Meetings of New York and Ohio Yearly Meetings, Conservative, Retrieved

Archival Information MINUTES OF MEETINGS OF NEW YORK AND OHIO YEARLY MEETINGS, CONSERVATIVE, RETRIEVED Alson D. Van Wagner* Twenty volumes of minutes and records have very recently been received by the Haviland Records Room, the archives of New York Yearly Meeting located at 15 Rutherford Place, New York City. The books should prove particularly interesting to Friends in New York, Ohio, and Canada as well as in New England. Seventeen volumes of minutes from from the Hector, Scipio, and DeRuyter Monthly Meetings, from Scipio Quarterly Meeting, and from the New York Yearly Meeting held at Poplar Ridge date from 1824 to 1954. Hector Monthly Meeting suffered three separations during its life begun in 1823. First, the Orthodox/Hicksite separation in 1828, second, a Gurneyite/Wilburite separation in 1847, and third, a separation of the Wilburites in 1859 known as the Kingite/Otisite separation. The last split was fortunately healed after twenty-two years. The recovered minutes cover the whole period for the Orthodox from 1824 to 1847, for the Wilburite from 1847 to 1859, for both Otisite and Kingite from 1859 to 1881, and the reunited small group until 1950. The minutes of the New York Yearly Meeting held at Poplar Ridge seem to be the first of that body to surface, although a few years ago minutes of the meeting for sufferings came to the Haviland Records Room. The yearly meeting had little business recorded other than the receiving and sending of epistles to those few yearly meetings with which it "corresponded." In 1896 it turned over its business to the Scipio Quarterly Meeting which in time became the Scipio Four Months Meeting and which expired in 1954. The minutes ofthat quarter from 1859 are all present in this collection. Minutes of Hector Preparative Meeting, and Preparative Meeting for Ministers and Elders, and of Scipio and DeRuyter Monthly Meetings are less full and extensive than for Hector Monthly Meeting. Genealogists may be excited by a volume of births, deaths, and certificates of removal for Hector and another for Scipio. Some births and deaths were entered in a timely fashion while others obviously were by recollection. A real surprise among the twenty-four volumes was the "Minutes of Men and Women Friends" of the "General Meeting of Friends of Ohio held at Chesterfeild (sic), Morgan Co., Ohio." Minutes of annual meetings of this splinter group of Ohio Conservative Friends extend from 1863 to 1877. Perhaps the inclusion of an epistle to the "Remnant of Friends in Ohio" from New York Yearly Meeting held at Poplar Ridge and signed by James D. Otis explains why the minutes of that remnant ended up in a collection of old minute books in central New York. Sewn in the back of the book of minutes are thirty-two pages of short abstracts, such as Joseph Hoag's Vision, as well as extracts of Joshua Maule's correspondence. Of course, it was around Joshua Maule that the "Maulite" group had separated from the main body of Ohio Conservative Friends. This acquisition is a very significant addition to the collection at the Haviland Records Room which already houses more than 300 years of records of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Vermont Friends with a few bits of Canada, Michigan, and Massachusetts. * Alson Van Wagner is clerk of the records committee of New York Yearly Meeting. 122 Book Reviews123 INDIANA YEARLY MEETING RECORDS Indiana Yearly Meeting records, formerly in the vault at the First Friends Meeting House in Richmond, are now deposited in care of the Earlham College archives. Book Reviews Edited by Edwin B. Bronner The Journal and Occasional Writings ofSarah Wister. Edited, with an introduction , by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. 149 pp. $26.50. This scholarly edition of Sarah Wister's journal and writings represents a promise kept. University presses acknowledged a decade ago that there had been a shocking neglect of American women writers before 1800 and that they would rectify it with dispatch. Quaker women's occasional writings form a significant portion of those neglected texts because Quaker families educated their daughters and encouraged habits of self-examination and journal keeping . While this explains Sarah...