Old Friends Record Book Found

BULLETINOF Friends Historical Association Vol. 35Spring Number, 1946No. 1 OLD FRIENDS RECORD BOOK FOUND By E. Virginia Walker and Dorothy G. Harris ONE of the first manuscript record books of the Society of Friends in America has recently come to light. As a contemporary account of people and meetinghouses during the earliest period of Maryland Quakerism it is an invaluable document. The book apparently had been in the possession of a family now no longer members of the Society of Friends but whose ancestor had belonged to Third Haven Meeting near Easton, Maryland. It came to the attention of a present member of that meeting who has made possible its permanent deposit in the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. The volume is a thin one containing 174 numbered pages. A limp brown leather cover protects the aged yellow paper and the sections are loosely sewn to it with heavy brown and white thread. Some of the pages are embellished with scroll work and the handwriting shows the quaint styles of seventeenth century penmanship . Inside the front cover is pasted a memorandum: This Book is the first, and Original Record Book of Marriage Certificates & Births and Deaths, of Third-haven Monthly Meeting of Friends, held near Easton Talbot County, Eastern Shore of Maryland commencing 1 Month 29th 1668 and ending 3 month 5th 1755, a period of 87 years. (A copy of the book has been under the care of the monthly meeting.) The volume is full of the delightful spelling and the curious phraseology of those men and women who were the lifestream of Quakerism in early Maryland. 4 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION The history of the Society of Friends in Maryland began shortly after the rise of Quakerism in England. Elbert Russell in his History of Quakerism states that "The first Friend to visit Maryland was Elizabeth Harris who made a number of converts there about Severn and Kent in 1656. Two years later Josiah Coale and Thomas Thurston came into the colony from Virginia on their way to New England and found a considerable response. In 1659 Thurston returned to Maryland. William Robinson, Christopher Holder and Robert Hodgson had large 'convincements' as a result of their labors the same year. . . . In Maryland there were many refugees from Virginia and a few from other places, who were neither Catholics nor Episcopalians . It was chiefly from among these unchurched colonists that the Quaker converts came." 1 As Friends in Maryland grew in number, meetings were established , and Third Haven Monthly Meeting was set up before 1676. The minutes from that year on are extant, and are deposited in the vaults of the Orphans' Court of Talbot County, Easton, Maryland.3 There appears to be no evidence that there was a meetinghouse on the site of the present Third Haven meetinghouse at that time. William C. Dunlap has determined from the minutes, however, that "as early as 1679 there were at least two meetinghouses within the bounds of this meeting [i. e. Third Haven Monthly Meeting]. One was located at Betty's Cove and the other at 'Tuccahoe'." 3 The minutes indicate that the meetinghouse at Third Haven was not built until 1684.* This is the lovely old frame building used by Third Haven Friends today. The recently discovered Third Haven record book goes back to a period even earlier than this ancient building of 1684 and the Monthly Meeting minutes of 1676, for it records a marriage 1 Elbert Russell, The History of Quakerism (New York, 1942), pp. 44-45. 2 A List of the Records of the Meetings Constituting the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends Held at Fifteenth and Race Streets, Philadelphia , compiled by Morgan Bunting (Philadelphia, 1906), p. 66. 3 William C. Dunlap, Quaker Education in Baltimore and Virginia Yearly Meetings (Philadelphia, 1936), p. 298. 4 Ibid., p. 298. Vol. 35, Spring 1946 FRIENDS RECORD BOOK5 in 1668 and two marriages in a meetinghouse at Betty's Cove in 1669. These marriages appear on the old record book's first two sheets which are nineteenth century copies, and contain nine summaries of marriage certificates from 1668 to 1677. These summaries were made by Samuel...