By Lucy Chumbley January 01, 2011 ( Volume 80 , No. 1 )

“Keep Looking Up” read the sentiment beneath the signature block in a recent e-mail to the diocese seeking records from the former Addison Parish for genealogical research.
Was that exhortation literal or metaphorical, recipients mused as the message travelled from inbox to inbox in search of answers: Trust in God? Or persevere in your research?

For the keepers of parish records, the process has always involved a bit of both.

Record Collection

Parishes in the Episcopal Church are asked to keep both service and membership records, according to the diocese’s governance officer, Ann Talty.

These include the date and church of baptism, records of marriage and confirmation or reception and, for services, the attendance, purpose and person presiding. Cemetery records – where a cemetery exists – also are kept, along with significant parish correspondence.
The rector is responsible for maintaining these records, and part of the bishop’s job during parish visitations is to ensure that this work is being carried out.

When a church closes, its records are sent to the diocesan archives, which are housed at Washington National Cathedral. The records of active parishioners are transferred either to the member’s new parish or to the diocese’s central register for safekeeping. In active parishes, the records of inactive members also are eventually transferred to the central register.

The Diocese of Washington is one of a handful of dioceses that keeps a central register, which consists of two large legers, dating from the 1890s, in which all entries are recorded by hand.
In the early days about two names a year were added, “because people stayed put,” said Tracy Dieter, who maintains the register. “Priests kept up with everybody, because people were not as mobile as they are now.” These days, typically at the end of a rector’s term, “hundreds of names are transferred at a clip,” she said. “When parishes lose track of someone, they send their information to the bishop. That way, we can find people if they need to be found.”

Lost & Found

There are all kinds of reasons for needing to be found.

Talty recalls a conversation with a woman in Florida who was seeking proof of her baptism in order to be married in the Roman Catholic Church: “She found the date, parish and priest in the central register.”

“We’ve had queries where people are trying to find proof of their grandparents’ marriage,” Dieter said. “Sometimes people are doing historical research.”

“Some people search for a great aunt’s baptismal record for a passport, as she was born at home,” said Susan Stonesifer, the diocesan archivist, noting that certificates of baptism can be used as an alternate form of identification. “The Anglican Church was a place of record.” In instances where births or deaths were not recorded by the state, “we can fill in some of those blanks.”

Several times a year, Talty says, someone will contact her with a request for help with genealogical research, particularly after the last member of a generation has died.

“People have called me over the years,” she said. “I’m like their last hope of where to steer them. People will call because their grandfather went to a church… maybe on U Street. It could be a place that was physically moved, closed or merged with another parish.”

Parish history can be complex, Stonesifer says. Take Nativity, Camp Springs: The parish was closed five years ago, but before it moved to Camp Springs, Nativity was located on Capitol Hill, in the church building that until recently was home to St. Monica’s Parish. St. Monica’s merged with St. James’, Capitol Hill in 2007, and its building is in the process of being sold. St. Monica’s, a predominantly African American parish, was originally located in Southwest Washington, but when demographics shifted and Nativity’s parishioners joined the “white flight” to the suburbs, St. Monica’s moved in to its church building on Capitol Hill.

Talty often refers to a well-worn Inventory of the Diocese of Washington’s Archives, a large volume published by the Roosevelt-era Works Progress Administration, which lists the locations of parish records and registries and offers some additional history.

“We help piece together where even to call,” she said. “So if a place closed in 1910, this tells me where their records were sent. There are a lot of other places we can look, but for the older parishes, this is where we start.”

Up In Flames

“Records are subject to anything,” Talty says. “A lot of the older churches had fires. People don’t think of churches burning, but they do: That’s why their records should be in a fireproof vault – and if they’re kept electronically, backed up off site.”

At least a dozen churches in this diocese have been damaged or destroyed by fire, she said. Forty years ago St. Thomas’, D.C., burned to the ground, a decade ago St. Philip’s, Laurel was devastated by fire, and more recent fires have gutted the Ascension and St. Agnes rectory (2002) and – in the neighboring Diocese of Virginia – Virginia Theological Seminary’s Immanuel Chapel (Oct. 22, 2010), to name just a few.

Fire is one of the more obvious ways parish records can be lost (“court houses can burn, too,” Talty notes), but records also go missing in ways that are more benign but just as vexing.
“Sometimes people think the church office is not a safe place to leave things, so they take it home,” Stonesifer says. “Then when they go to meet their maker…”

“I only have what I’ve got,” she says. “Research can be really tricky. I have a great appreciation of people trying to follow genealogy with this one little wisp.”

These days, record keepers face additional challenges. It’s important, for example, that in electronic records people are marked as “deceased” rather than deleted. Because once a person’s records have been deleted, they are… gone.

Paper correspondence no longer exists as it once did, as people communicate more informally via e-mail or telephone. Unless those e-mails are printed out, Stonesifer cautions, they, too can vanish. Archivists today also face challenges created by outdated data storage devices like floppy disks, she says, which will present a different kind of problem for future researchers.

For these reasons “parish registers aren’t going to go online,” Talty says. “Or not in our lifetime.”
“Paper, as bulky as it can be, is the only thing that lasts,” Stonesifer says. “I’m not advocating everyone walk around with inky fingers, but it behooves us to step back and say what it is we miss about this [way of communicating] – what it is we’re losing.”

Famous Men

In addition to the records of closed parishes, the diocesan archives house the records of all the former bishops of Washington. About once a month, Stonesifer says, a query will come in to the archives, and the resulting research can “literally go over days, weeks, months.”

But the outcome can be both unexpected and fascinating: “It’s even better than Crackerjack.”

“I never know when I open up a folder what I’m going to find,” she says. “I hate to have unanswered questions. I love helping people and sharing information with them, and hopefully finding delightful things to share. It’s the word made flesh for me.”

As a longstanding member of the Diocese of Washington and the wife of a priest, the work of tending the archives is very personal for Stonesifer.

“My records are here, my children’s records are here,” she says. “We have the famous and we have all the people who have been cared for in a pastoral sense. It’s really about people and their relationships with the institution, reflected through their records. … I really feel like we’re part of this family, whether you’re wearing purple or you’re that anonymous person in a picture.”

She quotes from Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 44, a passage which often comes to her mind. It begins, “Let us now sing the praises of famous men…” and continues on to describe other men of whom there is no memory: “They have perished as though they had never existed; they have become as though they had never been born, they and their children after them. But these also were godly men, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten; their wealth will remain with their descendants, and their inheritance with their children’s children…”

The lives of famous men are recorded in the archives, she says, alongside the lives of myriad other members of this church family whose names are written in the various parish registers.
When their descendants come looking, their stories emerge: A line of faded ink in a yellowing parish register makes a life real, the past tangible.

“I see it as a real opportunity for evangelism and to be able to explain to them what it means,” Stonesifer says. “Obviously, this place meant something to your ancestor’s life. … that same ritual is going on at a place near you.”

For the Future

“People often think of record-keeping as being not really necessary,” Talty says, pointing out that it is truly work for the future.

“Basically, we’re keeping track of things that mean nothing to us,” Dieter says of the two enormous legers in her care. “But when we die…”

Beyond people and parishes, the archives tell the story of the Diocese of Washington, from “pre-history” – before it was carved out of the Diocese of Maryland – until today.

“It’s not just 1896 to 2010,” Stonesifer says. “This job really reflects the ages, the way we used to communicate with each other.” She reaches down a gray archival box from a shelf in the serene, aerie-like room at the top of the cathedral’s administrative building where the diocesan records are stored.

It is one of the boxes storing the records of Bishop William F. Creighton. Inside is a collection of typewritten letters from bishops around the church in response to the 1974 “Philadelphia Ordinations,” when the first 11 women were ordained in the Episcopal Church. The letters have been smoothed out for storage, and the paperclips have been removed.

Times change. On large tables overlooking the treetops, volunteers are starting to sort through Bishop John Bryson Chane’s records which are now beginning to arrive from Church House.
A new bishop – the diocese’s ninth – will be elected in June. A chapter is drawing to an end, but the empty shelves stretch ahead, waiting for tomorrow.

Lucy Chumbley is the editor of Washington Window, the newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.