Much in our Quaker practice seems quaint, none more than our practice of minuting. It’s not the same as taking minutes of a company board meeting or city council session, but has a dimension all its own. Originating in the recording of persecutions in the initial decades of the Quaker movement, and in the subsequent petitions for redress and justice, our earliest minutes tell of “sufferings for Truth’s sake” and soon lead into the efforts of determining just what it means to live as a people of conscience.
Sometimes today we find the practice burdensome or unnecessary. Friends who follow the Old Ways in this matter will draft and read aloud the record on that part of the agenda, moving ahead only after that minute has been revised to satisfaction and approved. It’s slow and tedious, but it does focus the deliberations.
Here, the concept of clerking – especially for the recording clerk – has a meaning related to “clerk of court,” where the official records decisions from the bench above. In our case, Friends traditionally feel the high judge as Christ, and the meeting gathered as witnesses who would voice the sense of the resolution. I suppose we might see Friends attending our business sessions as a jury, then. If it were only as simple as guilty or not guilty!
Revisiting historic minutes, as I’ve done as a genealogist in the archives at Swarthmore and Guilford colleges, opens an appreciation for the practice as an art form. Perhaps no other records in America before the 1850 Census offer as much genealogical information as ours do. Even so, one discovers how faulty even the best efforts become. A individual simply fades from sight, a family moving away is recorded simply as “Robert and Sarah and children,” rather than naming them individually, as another clerk might have done, or the records might be lost to a house fire, as Centre, North Carolina’s, were, or simply lost altogether, as the first half-century of Dover’s were or West Epping’s were in our own lifetime. You might see an erasure, from first cousin to second, or a misspelling – and suddenly, you find yourself sitting with that clerk, somewhere in our history. This becomes something other than quaint, but personal engagement.
Jnana's Red Barn 
This may not have seemed emotionally impactful at first, but by the end my eyes were filled. Blinking back I felt in the last paragraph a connection of thought and emotion. As someone who has done my best at fledgling amateur genealogy of my own family and that of some relatives, I found that last paragraph to speak volumes. I know that feeling of connecting to someone from the past who took pains to preserve some fragments of their present for future generations to come to know. I have wondered about these people as much as I have thought of my ancestors. It is a fascinating tradition to have recorded as they did, revised. Unfortunately I haven’t ran into much in the way of quaker knowledge on the part of my maternal grandparents – as they immigrated from Lithuania around 1909. I have found census information and knew some of the bits and pieces my mother shared over the years until her passing. Now with all of her generation dead, I have found myself with far more questions than answers about them as individuals, and especially about their relatives, their life from the ‘old country”. How I wish someone had been as attentive as the Quakers in Lithuania. HA! But of course with the political upheavals being part of the destruction and rebuilding , the waves of emigration and immigration leaves little for the commomner to find. At any rate, I have enjoyed your post and look forward to more.
Thank you for your (unanticipated) reaction.
One thing I have found in doing genealogy is that if you know your family was part of a well-knit community, your people were living much like the others. So that even if you don’t have bits from their own history, you can draw from those around them. At least that’s how it’s worked for much of my own project, which is being posted at the Orphan George Chronicles blog.
Lithuania has its own rich history to be better known, and the fact that your people were part of it will enrich the story. Sometimes the place to start is by getting the questions down. Care to try drafting a “letter” to the last known generation?
I have to admit that ill be an interesting thing to do. I may be surprised by some of what might come out of this mind of mine. (Having gone through some – well -extreme changes in my world over the last 7 years, I have lost my “filter”.hahaha Of course some would say it never was intact enough in their view.This I will do. I have to warn… I probably write too much when I do write (build the watch to ask the time) so I apologize in advance but I definitely will take you up on this. Thank you. I will post.