Thank you to Sheila Havard for transcribing the minutes and to Randy Saylor for overseeing the transcription process. CFHA is grateful for their generous donation and time.
According to the Swarthmore Archives, “Nine Partners Monthly Meeting was set off from Oblong Monthly Meeting by Purchase Quarterly Meeting in 1769. It then became part of Nine Partners Quarterly Meeting upon its establishment in 1783. The meeting separated in 1828 into Orthodox and Hicksite branches. The Hicksite branch became an Executive Meeting in about 1928 under Nine Partners Half Yearly Meeting; in 1951, membership had dwindled and it merged with Oswego Monthly Meeting. The Orthodox branch moved to a new meeting house in 1882; in 1926 Friends in Millbrook joined with two other denominations to build a new church building in a union known as Lyall Memorial Federated Church.”
Many families who settled in Adolphustown and West Lake came from Nine Partners, and the family names included in the transcription will be familiar to those who have looked into Upper Canadian Quaker families.
Exterior of Nine Partners Meetinghouse in 1936, courtesy of the Historic American Buildings Survey. The meeting house was built in 1780.
Thank you to Carman Foster for transcribing the minutes and to Randy Saylor for overseeing the transcription process. The CFHA is grateful for their generous donation and time.
Beginning in 1845, this Orthodox-held minute book details the business of Pickering Monthly, reorganized in 1842 by the Canada Half Yearly Meeting to combine Uxbridge and Pickering. Meetings were held alternatively at both the Uxbridge and Pickering meeting houses. According to Arthur Dorland, Pickering Monthly Meeting changed to Pickering Executive in 1886 due to the general decline of the meeting and the movement of younger generations to other districts.[1]
Pickering Township was settled by families from Yonge Street, most notably Timothy Rogers. In 1809, Rogers and his family left Yonge Street and settled at Duffin’s Creek. Friends in the area were devastated soon after by an epidemic in 1809–1810 that killed many. At the end of 1810, Rogers returned to the United States and brought back with him more friends to settle the area.
Photo of the Uxbridge Meeting House, May 2019. Photo courtesy of the Uxbridge Quaker Meeting House Facebook page.
Photo of the Pickering Meeting House, built in 1867. The brick building replaced the former two-story meeting house, used from 1833–1866. Photo courtesy of Ajax.ca
[1] Arthur G. Dorland, The Quakers in Canada: A History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1968), 174.
Thank you to Carman Foster for transcribing the minutes, and to Randy Saylor for overseeing the transcription process. The CFHA is grateful for their generous donation and time.
This minute book follows the minutes from the Norwich Monthly Meeting, 1834 – 1852. Both books were held by Orthodox Friends. Like many meeting minutes, the transcript reports on the general state of the meeting, as well as meeting business.
The township of Norwich was originally settled by Quakers when Peter Lossing and his brother-in-law Peter DeLong purchased 15,000 acres of land in 1810. A year later, a group of Quaker families from Duchess County, New York, moved with Lossing to the area.
According to Arthur Dorland, the earliest families in the area included the Lossings, DeLongs, Moores, Curtises, Stovers, and Lancasters.[1] They were closely followed by the McLees, Sackridges, Cornwells, McAuleys, Palmers, Siples, and the Hillikers.[2] A meeting was set up in the home of Joseph Lancaster in 1812, and by 1819, Norwich became its own monthly meeting, no longer under the authority of Pelham Monthly.
Photo of the “Old Brick” Quaker meeting house in Norwich, first built in 1850. The building was demolished in 1949. Photo courtesy of the Norwich and District Museum and Archives.
[1] Arthur Dorland, The Quakers in Canada: A History (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1968), 84.
[2] Mary Beth Start, “Peaceable Kingdom – Unsound Friends: Norwich Monthly Meeting Divided,” Canadian Quaker History Journal 75 (2010): 3.
Thank you to Swarthmore College Archives for providing images of the minute book, first scanned in 1950, and to Carman Foster, who transcribed the minutes.
Established in 1799, Oswego Monthly Meeting was originally set off from Nine Partners MM. The meeting separated during the Hicksite-Orthodox schism of 1827-28, and both factions are the predecessors of active meetings: Bulls Head-Oswego (Hicksite, name changed in 1980) and Poughkeepsie Monthly Meeting (Orthodox, name changed in 1870).
Many names in this transcription will be familiar to those who have read the Upper Canadian meeting minutes, including Dorland, Bull, Haight, Hoag, White, Moore, Palmer, and Clapp. Mentions of the Upper Canadian meetings are found in Deborah Clapp’s 1800 certificate of removal to Canada, Mahitable Bull’s removal to Adolphustown in 1803, Ruth Christy’s removal to Adolphustown in 1803, and Phoebe (nee Barker) Blount’s removal to Adolphustown in 1814 after her marriage to Cornelius Blount. Further removals to Upper Canada include Huldah Wilcox to Pelham Monthly Meeting in 1815.
Photo of Oswego Monthly Meeting House, built 1790. Photo from Alson D. Van Wagner’s “A Short History of Oswego Monthly Meeting,” Bulls Head-Oswego Monthly Meeting, Clinton Corners, NY, 1986.
Thank you to Swarthmore College Archives for providing images of the minute book, first scanned in 1950, and to Carman Foster and Randy Saylor, who transcribed the minutes.
This minute book details the beginning of Nine Partners MM, first set off from Oblong MM by Purchase Quarterly in 1769. With this new inclusion, CFHA’s online transcriptions of Nine Partners MM now stretch from 1769 to 1811, with records of testimonies, marriages, and removals from 1769 to 1897.
Exterior of Nine Partners Meetinghouse in 1936, courtesy of the Historic American Buildings Survey. The meeting house was built in 1780.
Friends Historical Library (FHL) at Swarthmore College, PA, hosts one of the most extensive archives of early American Quaker meeting minute books and other documents to be found anywhere in North America.
All books were photographed in 1950 by Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City and are of a very high quality.
FHL and CFHA have worked collaboratively for many years to provide improved access to the content of certain minute books. Of particular interest to Canadian Friends and researchers are the minute books which relate to the Nine Partners Monthly Meeting and those of its affiliated Preparative meetings located in New York state and adjacent area of Vermont, the Hudson River Valley and watershed.
These meetings were the source meetings for many of the earliest Quaker families to migrate to Upper Canada and establish new meetings in Adolphustown (1798), throughout Prince Edward County (West Lake Meetings) and later meetings found by Timothy Rogers at Pickering and Newmarket.
As a result of the collaboration, members of the CFHA transcription group have been able to complete and post on the CFHA website complete and searchable transcriptions of the major Nine Partners and affiliated Meetings. Minutes of Ferrisburg, PA are of particular interest as they include many references to Timothy Rogers.
More recently FHL has been able to provide digital images of three minute books of Muncy Monthly Meeting in Pennsylvania. These minute books provide many details of the removals to Upper Canada from the meeting located at Catawissa, PA. The Catawissa Meeting largely relocated to Uxbridge, Ontario and established the Uxbridge preparative meeting under Yonge Street Monthly Meeting in Newmarket, Ontario. Two of the Muncy / Catawissa books have been completely transcribed and posted on the CFHA website. Transcription of the third and longest minute book is ongoing and it is expected to be posted sometime next year.
Although the FHL holdings of Nine Partners Monthly Meeting have included additional minute books and documents, CFHA has not been able to provide transcriptions because neither the microfilm images nor the original documents had been digitized. We are pleased to announce that FHL has recently digitized additional material, including the earliest initial Nine Partners minutes and has provided images to CFHA.
Transcription Coordinator Randy Saylor has received these latest images and reports the following:
Images 0001 – 0024 are of a births and deaths register 1810 – 1893
Images 1025 – 1798 – 1898 are a marriage register 1798 – 1898 with a 6 page typed index at the end.
Images 008 – 0234 are the Nine Partners Men’s Minutes 1769 to 1779 that we have been waiting for!! This will give us a great insight into the war years.
Images 0235 – 546 are a minute book for the years 1820 – 1851
These new minute book images will allow us to learn more about how this meeting dealt with the onset of and duration of the American Revolution up to our existing transcriptions dating from 1779. We also expect to learn additional details of the complaint brought against Philip Dorland.
Please watch this space for further updates. Also please note that our new set of images provides us an opportunity to invite additional volunteer transcribers.
Transcribing can be a very rewarding experience and an excellent indoor activity as we approach the winter months.
We are seeking additional volunteer transcribers. If you are interested in joining the CFHA volunteer transcription team, please contact [email protected].
Canadian Friends Historical Association (CFHA) is pleased to announce the latest collaboration with Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. Arrangements are now in place for staff at Friends Historical Library to provide CFHA with digital images of three late eighteenth-century minute books for transcription. All of these minute books relate to the Nine Partners Monthly Meeting and its affiliated Oswego Preparative Meeting. The Nine Partners MM, the Nine Partners school and associated Preparative meetings figure prominently in the northward expansion of Quaker communities up the Hudson River Valley. Such expansions frequently involved the relocation of members of the established meetings to the more remote areas of new settlement. The minute books of Nine Partners and associated meetings provide valuable records of the members who requested certificates of removal and when such requests were submitted and approved.
Of particular interest to CFHA members and Canadian researchers are records which relate to the Adolphustown Preparative Meeting in Upper Canada. This meeting was established under the care of Nine Partners MM in 1798 under the leadership of Philip Dorland. Although birthright members of Nine Partners MM, both Philip and his brother Thomas had served in provincial militia on behalf of the British during the revolutionary war. As such, they were entitled to claim extensive land grants in Upper Canada when they and their families joined many other UE Loyalists who settled the Adolphustown area in 1784.
The new images to be provided will include the first minute book of the Men’s Monthly Meeting. This minute book covers the period between the establishment of the monthly meeting in 1769 to 1779. It is hoped that transcription of this minute book will add detail to a significant event in the early Quaker experience of Philip Dorland. A number of years ago, CFHA requested and received images of the Nine Partners Men’s Monthly Meeting from 1779 onwards. The specific request was granted on the premise that earlier records would not contain information related to migrants into what would become Canada. It came as a great surprise, then, to discover that the minutes for 1773 recorded the disownment of a late adolescent Philip Dorland.
Nine Partners Meeting House, built in 1780. Photo taken in 2010 by Daniel Case.
Once settled in Upper Canada in 1784, Philip Dorland played an important role in the early political life of the young community, and in the establishment of what would become a flourishing Quaker presence at Adolphustown and in Prince Edward County. For a larger account of this history, please see “New Light on Philip Dorland: Prodigal Son to Patriarch” by Gordon Thompson with Randy Saylor in Canadian Quaker History Journal volume 79, for membership year 2014. We look forward with anticipation to learn what this new set of images will reveal about Philip Dorland’s disownment.
In addition to the Nine Partners MM Men and Joint, 1769-1779 images, we look forward to receiving images of Oswego Prep Mens, 1794-1798 and those of a Bulls Head, Oswego MM Women’s minutes 1799-1817.
We wish to express our appreciation to Jordan Landes, curator of Friends Historical Library, and her staff in providing these images. Due to Covid 19 lockdowns and closures, we are unable to access additional images at either the Archives of Ontario or the Canadian Yearly Meeting Archives. The new images will provide hundreds of pages of transcription resource material.
New volunteer CFHA transcribers are always welcome. The work is not hard and is performed at your own pace and convenience. Guidance and advice is provided when needed. Please contact the writer at [email protected] for additional details if interested.
This new transcription is two books in one. The first forty-seven pages include removal certificates from 1797 to 1808 and record a number of removals from the Muncy Meeting in Pennsylvania to Pelham Meeting in the Niagara area and the Yonge St Meeting in the Newmarket area.
As well, the minutes detail a number of Friends, including Ellen McCarty and Mercy Ellis, who travelled to Upper Canada in the aftermath of the Orthodox-Hicksite schism.
Our thanks and appreciation go out to Carman Foster once again for his transcription from images of the original text, and to Randy Saylor for researching and writing the detailed introductory notes.
A photo of the Friends Meeting House, Pennsdale (Muncy), courtesy of the James V. Brown Library.
The Toronto Quaker Meeting continues to be an active meeting to this day. More about the history of the meeting can be found on the first page of the transcription.
The minutes themselves provide a wealth of information for researchers and genealogists alike. Visitors were welcomed and certificates of membership accepted from meetings in England (Newcastle, London, and Norwich), Ireland (Lisburn and Dublin), and across the United States (Kansas, New York, Iowa, and Indiana).
The following insight into the minutes has been provided by CFHA co-chair, Gordon Thompson:
The latest minute book to be transcribed is that of the Toronto Monthly Meeting (orthodox) 1893-1902. To readers familiar with transcriptions of the 1860s or earlier, the tone and shift in principles away from the primacy of the personal ‘inner light’ to one based on salvation and acknowledgement of sin will be jarring. This minute book commences a little more than ten years after the Orthodox/Conservative split, and it appears the Orthodox meeting continues to reverberate and rebound away from the traditional founding Quaker precepts. Researchers will find an abundance of family names and like references. Please note that this is the earliest minute book of any of the early Toronto meetings that is known to have been preserved and available for microfilming and transcription.
Our thanks and appreciation go out to Carman Foster once again for his transcription from images of the original text, and to Randy Saylor for researching and writing the detailed introductory notes. Thanks are also due to Jane Sweet, a member of the Toronto Monthly Meeting Library Committee, for tracking down Toronto Monthly Meeting library sources.
Friends’ Meeting House at 28 Pembroke St., Toronto. The Toronto Preparative Meeting purchased this meeting house in 1881 and it was in use until 1902. Photo is courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.
Plaque of the Dunkerron Quaker cemetery. Image from LostCemeteries.blogpost.com.
Friends gather to worship in their Meeting Houses. They do Meeting business there and obviously socialize. Although members may live some distance away, they are said to come from their Meeting, in this case from Tecumseth Preparative Meeting.
Researchers might prefer the Lot and Concession of a family, where births and deaths occur. What we learn from this document is that Friends set their sights on the Meeting House. Weddings happen here, and social life revolves around the pulse of Quaker worship as much as of the seasons. Indeed, Joseph John Kiteley is appointed “to dig graves,” a measure of permanence.
Preparative Meetings are devolved from Monthly Meetings. As the minutes show, the MM has considerable authority and is equally devolved from the Yearly Meeting and so on, even to the Philadelphia YM or the London YM. These levels of organization produce Minutes, Directives, Devotional Tracts, Assessments and a set of querulous Queries, which are a study in themselves. All of these elements are seen and revealed in the Minutes.
Much else can be deduced (and, with caution, inferred).
In the Tecumseth Minutes [TPM] evidence is available to link with the larger history of the area, add specifics to government documents and confirm family connections and history. Equally the minutes are a stark, often awkwardly formal documentation, too sparse to be a genealogical goldmine.
Here is a sample of what can be gleaned both personal and general from these pages.
TPM is a spin off from Yonge Street Monthly Meeting. Two members are appointed to attend the MM “and to report.” TPM would meet on Wednesdays, the time apparently designated by MM as 10:00AM. This schedule is not held rigidly, as the reading will show.
Here is the geographic difficulty Tecumseth representatives faced. Three possible routes to Meeting can be seen. The shortest route is to take highway 9 south of Dunkerron east to Yonge Street and south a piece to the Meeting House. That counts as some 18 kilometres, which takes 22 minutes as the car drives. Horse and buggy are another matter, as is the realization that Friends were living in 19th century conditions. If you have Googled the map, the presence of the Pottageville Swamp looms. It bestrides the easy route to Meeting. A more southerly passage on the Lloydtown line to Kettleby is no more promising. In winter, the route would be possible, but several instances in the minutes show that “impassible roads” and Simcoe County’s well-documented spring blizzards and floods make the shortest route adrift or a quagmire. That most roads throughout Ontario were a quagmire is well understood.
The north route makes sense when conditions required, but it is 22 kilometres at least. North on 27 is Bondhead, the Post Office, where a traveler would go east on 88 and find the bridge at Bradford over the Holland River down to Holland Landing, where Yonge Street begins, and thence to Newmarket and the Meeting House. Sunday is a good time to travel and evenings paced by a prime horse or team would be pleasant.
The isolation is real for this small community of Friends. The minutes show them under long-term leadership but an ever-diminishing membership. The self census of 1871 and 1875, the only detailed reports recorded, show a heavy drop in members. From 106 the complement falls to 44. One wonders to where and why 62 Friends left the fold. Yet their urge to carry on is poignant.
Assessment reports show a dedication to local needs and to principles of a global calling. Cash amounts are collected on a progressive basis, it appears, and suggest a frugal but growing economy.
By the 1890s the minutes become spotty, meetings are not held, representatives more often do not make it to MM. The Men’s and Women’s meetings combine and switch to Sunday meetings.
And then the Minutes stop.
More directly and personally, figures show up. Peter Doyle stands out almost until his death in 1888. His land is used for the cemetery and the Meeting House. His firstborn is buried there as is his first wife, Phoebe Minn, before the House is built. Peter is “in care of the House” institutionally. He seems to hold out for his $12 fee for service, with the Committee charged with “finding a Friend to care for the House” taking as long as three months to reappoint Peter. The fourteenth time Peter is faced with the care of the house, the decision is deferred eight times until Peter is removed and Jacob Doyle is appointed. Peter is 82 years old.
As his name fades away, another long-time caretaker is found. Jacob Doyle, already established as Clerk, takes on the role at $6 per annum, or “50 cents per month” as he must have preferred.
Jacob is the only lived child of Peter and Phoebe. His story goes beyond the Minutes and is recorded as a bachelor of dedication, wealth and generosity.
There are a number of Hughes men who contribute to the community. Amos Hughes teams with Peter Doyle regularly as representatives of TPM to MM. His name disappears suddenly, as does his presence on the census. Has he returned to Pelham or even New York? Then, Samuel Hughes appears on the record.
In addition, new members are installed as their requests are recorded.
Here a simple wisdom is shown. Rookies are welcomed and in a moment are teamed with veterans to represent TPM at MM. Commitment is strengthened and a new member is introduced to the larger parent Meeting. The six new members recorded between 1873 to 1888 is sparse growth indeed. They, of course, represent families, but the dwindling character of the experiment is felt.
As a last reflection, the case of Henry Doyle is curious. Henry is the 6th of Peter’s five boys and two girls. Rachel Haight, of American stock from the Haights of Pickering Township by Duffin’s Creek, marries Peter at MM in 1836 and carries on the frontier tradition with energy and success.
Their first born, John Haight Doyle moves to Pilkington Township near Elora, and breaks the bush there. Margaret [Doyle] Wilson researched her great-grandfather and notes that he became Methodist. Elora was well away from his co-religionists. The need for a religious community placed them in the hands of the burgeoning, evangelical Methodists, where John is active. His first born, John Alan, becomes a Minister in the Great North West, covering the Prairie region.
Henry stays in Tecumseth Township to take over the homestead and the adjacent farm. He shows in the minutes as a mature adult, active as Clerk, on committees, representative to MM, organizing various assessments, even caring for the House and a repair project. The Homestead is parts of Lots 24 and 23, Concession 3 Tecumseth. Immediately south on Lot 23 Concession 2 another Irish family is settled.
James Manning is the son of Joseph, an Anglo-Irishman who was “a pay master of the forces in Ireland” and a Methodist. Now there’s an incentive to emigrate, as the Pale becomes unsafe after the Great Rebellion of 1798. James is an Evangelical Wesleyan Methodist preacher with energy. He builds the Dunkerron Methodist community, represents the church in General Conference and sends three sons into the ministry.
James has a daughter, Ann Jane, or “Annie”, who lives, as the farmers say, “within buggy distance.” Henry and Annie are married in 1875. Peter Doyle resisted the Hicksites. John has gone Methodist and Henry has married one. But Henry is not disowned. He carries on, showing frequently in the Minutes as active and an office holder. There is the curiosity. Certainly, Annie does not convert. She dies at 35 and is buried in the Dunkerron Methodist Cemetery beside the new red brick Methodist Church.
Henry marries again, ten years later, returning to an Orthodox Quaker family, with Jennie Lynd. Henry’s eldest, Manson Doyle, only ten when his mother is taken, is said by his daughter “to have broken his father’s heart” and became a Methodist Minister, although he married a West Lake MM Quaker, Augusta Belle Saylor. Manson journeyed west, as well, and became an energetic builder of Union, after which he became Youth Secretary of the United Church until age 75.
But Henry was never “disowned,” as so many Quakers were for “marrying out.” He is buried in the Tecumseth PM burial ground with Jennie Lynd. Nearby are Joseph and Peter and Rachel, representatives of the faithful Orthodoxy.
“Tecumseth Prep meet of Friends Held 7 mo 4th 1888: It was proposed & united with that this meeting be held in joint scession after this month.”
Simply, without flourish or regrets, the Meeting begins its final years, exactly 5 months after Peter’s death.
The Joint meetings carry on until 1898. Names such as Susannah, Delia, and Martha Ella Hughes appear as William Chantler and Margaret, the newer Friends, take on responsibility. By 1895 Annie Molison is in “care of the House” for $6 per annum. Henry’s last reference is 11-4-1885, although he is an energetic 37. Jacob Doyle remains active to the end.
A comparison to the Yonge Street MM minutes will build on these insights. Good stories never end.
