An Encyclopedia of Quaker Genealogy

48 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF QUAKER GENEALOGY THE Directors of Friends' Historical Association voted, at the meeting of April 4, 1938, to subscribe to William Wade Hinshaw's Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, although the Association maintains no library, and in general avoids the purchase of books. The Directors' action was both a means of giving financial support to one of the great historical undertakings of present-day Quakerism, and, perhaps more significantly , an expression of their interest and moral backing. Advertisements of the second volume of this great work are already appearing—send $15.00, pre-publication price (regular retail price, $20.00) , to the Friends Book and Supply House, 101 South 8th Street, Richmond, Indiana, and secure a subscription copy. The book had not appeared as the Bulletin goes to press, or we should have presented a review of it; but with the first volume before us, and the second outlined in the prospectuses, we get an idea of the magnitude and character of the proposed series. The past practices of the Friends in keeping careful records of births, marriages, and deaths, and also of removals to and from their meetings, makes the minute books of monthly meetings a gold mine of historical and specifically genealogical information from Colonial days down to the present, both here and abroad— for immigrating Quakers often brought certificates with them. The first volume of the proposed series has over 1,200 large pages, with the index (indispensable in such a work) ; it covers the minutes of the thirty-three oldest meetings in the North Carolina Yearly Meeting. The records from each monthly meeting (some of which are in Tennessee and Virginia), are preceded by a brief historical sketch, itself a valuable addition to Quaker history. The second volume will be about as large, and will cover the Monthly Meetings of Salem, New Jersey ; Burlington, New Jersey ; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Falls, Pennsylvania—an area rich in Quaker history. These are large and costly volumes, and the casual reader may pass them by. But libraries can hardly afford to be without them, whether their patrons are Quakers or not; for "the ancestors of several millions of present-day Americans" are listed; and his- NOTES49 torians, and historical societies, as well as individuals whose interests run along historical or genealogical lines, will soon learn to regard them as indispensable. This is the sort of undertaking ordinarily sponsored by a large and wealthy society, or by a foundation ; in this case the original impulse, the driving force and organizing genius, and much of the money, have come from one Friend. The Friends' Historical Association may rejoice that such a Friend was to be found. NOTES THE Centenary Fund of Friends' Central School, Philadelphia, has published (dated 1938) a history of the school, using as basic text a narrative of the foundation and development of the school by Joseph E. Haines, then on the faculty, originally published in 1892-23 in five issues of the newly started school paper, the Blue and Gray, and now reprinted with a few notes. The volume contains 57 pages, and is attractively printed by "several friends of the school" as a contribution to the Centenary Fund, illustrated with a facsimile reproduction of the original editorial page of Vol. 1, No. 6 of the Blue and Gray, in which the first part of the history appeared. The History outlines antecedent conditions, touches discreetly upon the separation and the retention by the Orthodox Friends of the established school properties of the Society, and the early difficulties encountered in establishing a school for the education of children whose parents were not in sympathy with the Orthodox body. Two elementary schools, one for boys and one for girls, in different parts of the same building, were opened in 1835, on a site on Fourth Street above Cherry, then the center of the residential district; ten years later money was raised by private subscription for a building to be used for a high school, and Friends' Central School was formally opened here on September 1, 1845 ; in 1857 a new building was erected on Fifteenth Street, adjoining the Race Street Meeting House...