Disciple: Researching Your Roots

The how and why of discovering and building your church’s story

By the Rev. Canon Lindsey Ardrey and Lynn Hoke

It’s so early in the morning that darkness still lingers in the sky. A persistent star twinkles in the distance. The cloak of dark matches her cloak of grief. Mary sits in the only place her grief makes sense—inside this garden, the final resting place of her friend, teacher and mentor. She wants to stay close because what’s outside these garden walls is a violent and chaotic world. Settling her nerves just enough, Mary approaches the tomb. But something is not right. The tomb’s stone isn’t where it should be, and it’s open. Fear bathes her body, and she rushes to the tomb—it’s empty. She thought the terror of the previous day was over, but somehow this is worse. Or it’s the same—she can’t quite tell because nothing is the way it ought to be. So, she runs. She leaves her sanctuary and runs to her friends and tells them their teacher’s body is missing. Without a word, her two friends leave her behind and take off running like schoolboys in a race. Mary, suddenly filled with fatigue and her legs feeling like lead, makes her way back to the garden. Her movements are slow, and her body doesn’t feel like her own. She reaches the place and meets her friends again. They’re on their way out, none of them saying a word. She can see it on their faces and read it in their eyes. He’s gone. They return home, but Mary remains.

Finally, she lets herself fall apart. Her body shakes, and her eyes burn with hot tears that flow down her cheeks. Inside, her heart feels both heavy and empty, and a chasm opens in the pit of her stomach. Her legs tingle, and she rocks her body back and forth, trying to ease the pain. But the tears keep falling. Staving away the feeling of complete incapacitation, she commands her legs to carry her back to the tomb. And there, before her eyes, as if in some kind of dream state or vision, two angelic beings are inside. They ask about her tears. Mary thinks that maybe they can help her locate her teacher’s body, so she tells them why she cries. As soon as the last words roll off her tongue, she hears a voice behind her. A strange man, probably the one tasked with tending this garden, asks her the very same question the two white-clad beings asked, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” A new emotion arises, and Mary just wants answers. Defiantly, she asks the gardener to tell her where her friend has been taken so she can tend to his body.

In response, this strange gardener calls out her name, “Mary!” Her grief-soaked anger melts away, and her heartbeat quickens. Before her brain can make sense of anything, she hears herself yell, “Teacher!”

It’s him. She’s heard him call her name one last time.

This is where Jesus meets Mary. Mary heard her name coming from the lips of her beloved friend and teacher, and she understands herself in a new way. The Gospel of John places Jesus’ resurrection in a garden, taking us back to the beginning of time. Back to Eden, back to the site of creation, back to the moment when humans told God they were naked, back to the moment when humans left their first home.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

In the work of reparations, we have invited each of you to consider seriously your church community’s origins. To get curious about your church’s story. We are asking you to return, like Mary, to the garden of your origin because this is where resurrection happens. This is where we meet Jesus. This is where we hear our own names anew—right at the site of our origin. And we’ll find that things look different, they smell different, the tomb that had a body in it the night before is now empty, angels appear and the world has been turned upside down. But we’re being called to witness and to be present to Jesus’ revelation.

As you continue in this spiritual quest to which we’ve invited you, call out the names of your forebearers, and then go seek them out. All you need is one name, and it will lead you to another, and then another, and soon you’ll have a great cloud of witnesses to your past.

Most of these witnesses were complicated and complex humans with capacities for great care and generosity, sometimes tempered by confusing or regretful behaviors. If shame, guilt, or anger rises within you during your search, know that you are redeeming your ancestors and healing our timelines. You are working in a new time with new information, and engaging in work they could not or would not do themselves. In this stage of our journey, it is not our task to “make things right,” because that is God’s job. We are called to hear our own names on Jesus’ lips, and to imitate him by calling the names of those who came before us. Name their steadfast, cringe-worthy, fortifying, loving or oppressive deeds. Naming begets power for Jesus to do his healing on us. Let’s give Jesus something to work with.

You are invited to follow Mary’s brave lead and enter the garden of your origin to find out who you, and we, truly are.

DIGGING DEEPER, HONORING HISTORY

As part of the ongoing reparations and restitution initiative, each of our congregations is being asked to consider its history, to include the founding, location, social setting, wealth disparities, membership, growth, change—and its intersection with racial dynamics.

If you have already begun your local history exploration, carry on! If you are ready to consider it, please accept this open invitation to see what resources might be waiting at your church, in the diocesan archives, online and elsewhere.

We encourage the use of primary sources, including church and diocesan records. These are things like church registers, service registers, annual convention journals, annual reports, local newspapers and other printed or handwritten documents created through the years by people who were there at the time. Our annual diocesan journals are considered primary documents. While they may not be scintillating reading, they rock!

Dating from 1817, diocesan journals offer multiple reports and, what’s even better, lots of names: bishops, clergy, lay delegates, persons in the ordination process, and, from time to time, even the names of lay officers in our various churches. The bishops’ annual addresses, reports on visitations, and approvals for property transactions are all documented.

Individual parochial reports in the journals help monitor the “pulse” of the diocese with a church-by-church listing of information in categories that have changed over time, including membership details, attendance numbers, organizations, offerings, assessments, expenses, building projects and the current land and building values. Both before and after the Civil War, reports for the sacramental services of baptism, confirmation, marriage and burial included a notation of “White” or “Black.” You can find searchable diocesan journals at episdionc.org/journal-of-convention.

LEARN FROM OTHERS

A few samples of actual research projects may provide a spark or a point of entry for your congregation. To repeat: as with genealogy, having actual names to track can be crucial in making a variety of church history connections.

St. Luke’s, Salisbury (founded 1824), received a Mission Endowment Grant in 2018 for “an integrated series designed to reveal, understand and process the history of racism in Salisbury.” (“Discovering History,” Disciple, Winter 2020)

After the local planning committee contracted with Dr. Gary Freeze to examine and report on this history, one of his research trips was to the diocesan archives. His final report notes the importance of both diocesan and local records:

“I dipped comprehensively into church records, at both the diocesan and parish levels. I explored particularly the antebellum Journals of the diocesan annual meetings, looking for two things: any mention of St. Luke’s that named names or gave numbers—e.g., confirmations, baptisms, marriages, burials, often listed by race—and I made notes about the same information for other parishes in the diocese, as a means of gauging relative black involvement in church activities. At the parish level, I read all pages of the congregation record books, to determine the names, dates, etc., of both white and black congregants. I started with the first meager records in the 1830s and continued through the height of the Reconstruction years, when the few black members begin to disappear from the records.”

This example illustrates the historical enterprise known (actually) as “mining the archives.” Finding just one “nugget”—just one name—can make all the difference. With one key name in hand, it’s possible for deed records to be searched, people to be located, relationships to be tracked, connections to be made, and elements to be crafted into a story—a history.

One benefit from the COVID-19 slowdown was time—time to engage in a long-term project of “mining” the handwritten journals of three of our bishops: Theodore Benedict Lyman, Joseph Blount Cheshire and Edwin Anderson Penick. All three bishops listed the names of all the people they confirmed during each church visit. They also noted race: “All Colored” at the top or the side of the page; or used the notation “(colored)” or “(Col.)” or “(c)” beside the name of each Black confirmand, including those on the occasional listings for predominantly white churches. Following Bishop Penick, who died in 1959, the confirmation lists began to appear on typewritten pages without any racial notation.

This collection of names from the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras offers the possibility of making a number of connections. Individual Black church members—and fellow Episcopalians—can be identified “in time” in 23 communities around our diocese. Names can be cross-referenced with city directories to identify all residents by work and residence status. Primary source research starting from a database such as this would involve some “mining,” as we say, but the rewards in our commitment to Becoming Beloved Community might be greater than expected. Black and white church members alike can find names both familiar and forgotten, names of people whose family and friends continue to share the bond of our church.

St. Michael’s, Raleigh (1950) and Holy Family, Chapel Hill (1952) were founded within two years of each other. These two post-World War II, predominantly white Episcopal congregations have recently been going deep into the “histories” of their respective church sites. Presumably, they each had a fresh start in a prospering decade, and they each have flourished. Today, in light of the diocesan mission strategy of Racial Reckoning, Justice and Healing, their clergy and groups of church members have begun taking a closer look at their actual church sites and histories through a new lens.

Their two stories offer both methodology and encouragement for other congregations ready to explore their sites and stories.

For Holy Family (“Historic Foundations: How Did We Get Here?,” Disciple, Winter 2023), they began by asking questions. Some of the questions included: How did we come to be in this place? What people have lived on it, when and why? How has the land been worked, and by whom? What forces were at play in the formation of this town, neighborhood, buildings and people? How does all this connect to what we know about systemic racism? And what do all those things tell us about our relationship with God?

For St. Michael’s (“Historic Foundations: Uncovering History,” Disciple, Winter 2023), an in-depth study of the church property itself and the neighboring land in relation to race, real estate and Raleigh’s growth became the focus of a community forum around race and housing. The hope is that this parish initiative “will not erase history, but rather will continue to uncover history, using what we find as an impetus and inspiration for going forward justly.”

However you choose to proceed, remember there is no one way to do it. We can help get you started, and once you’ve found a starting point, all you have to do is follow it on the historical journey on which it will take you.

The Rev. Canon Lindsey Ardrey is the canon missioner for reparations and restitution ministry for the Diocese of North Carolina. Lynn Hoke is the archivist of the Diocese of North Carolina.

RESEARCH THE ARCHIVES

For information, resources and access to archival information, visit episdionc.org/archives.

Microfilm boxes were prepared during the State Archives project to microfilm some North Carolina church records, many dating from the 1800s. Check for and request a digitized version of your records for $15. Contact Lynn Hoke for more information.

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