Sinful Souls and Church Discipline for the Genohistorian

I had been predisposed to see the worst in my great-grandfather, George Lewis Cox of Randolph County, Alabama. I saw him through the eyes of my grandmother—his daughter-in-law—who remembered him without a speck of fondness. As she recalled it, he was a drunken philanderer who drove his betrayed wife to suicide. But he was also, apparently, a church-going man. Might he have been called out under church discipline?

Church disciplinary records—where they have survived—are a goldmine for details of the ornery ancestors who flouted the rules. But their richness for the genohistorian goes much deeper than simply mining a few colorful anecdotes about an isolated ancestor. They build for us the moral environment in which our ancestors operated and introduce us to neighbors at the most personal level. They are worth reading—beginning to end.

I happened to have some time on my hands while handling other business at Samford University one day, a few years ago. Like any self-respecting genealogist, I found myself drawn to the Special Collections department in the basement of the main library. Being a Baptist university, they have an extensive collection of church records, particularly from Baptist congregations. It seemed a long shot, but I asked if they had the records of Big Springs Baptist Church in Omaha, Alabama—a tiny place that does not even show up on many maps. They gave me a roll of microfilm, and there it was.

I didn’t know how actively my family participated in this church—only that they were buried there. How much would the records mention them, if at all?

Reading Around the Ancestor

The records were not indexed—inconvenient, indeed, for a person who wants to jump quickly to any mention of ancestors without wasting time on the supposedly irrelevant masses of information around the ancestor mentions. But because no one has indexed the records, I started to read through, page by page. And because I read, this exercise became genohistorical, rather than just genealogical.

Oh, there were mentions of George. Some were just the mundane references in the many lists a church keeps for any number of reasons. But then there were the disciplinary actions of the church, which were a part of their monthly business meetings. The church called out George, sometimes alone and sometimes with his brother-in-law, Jack Burson, always for the same sin: drinking. So the record supported my grandmother’s memory.

George always got off with a slap on the wrist by saying he would not continue to drink. Then the next month, they did it all again. It intrigued me, though, to see how the church called two women to task. They had visited a church of another denomination and now stood accused of their heretical behavior. The punishment? Excommunication. Out. Gone.

Wow. By reading around the mentions of George and Jack, I learned something of great value about what the church valued and what it feared. Drinking was a social annoyance, but questioning the specific creed of the church was not to be tolerated. Would the outcome have been the same if the people called before the church for discipline were men? That will require more research but is a question worth asking.

Church Membership in Retrospect

As a matter of fact, church disciplinary records for any church in the vicinity of your ancestral home, whether or not your ancestors were members, would be worth your time. They tell you a lot about what qualified as moral, what as acceptable, and what as off limits, creating for you a much richer picture of the world in which your ancestors lived.

Finding your ancestors in a church, listed as members or being disciplined, also tells you something very important. Joining a church a century or more ago usually meant a lot more than it means now. We have often miscast earlier communities as irreligious because the number of church members seemed small, compared to the population or the seating capacity of the churches. But many people went to church without joining.

To join a church in the nineteenth or even into the early twentieth century was to give over the right to privacy and self-governance. In the Journal of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, which I’ve mentioned before, she often fretted about whether she should join a church, and if so, which one. She would not make a profession of faith in a creed unless she had absolutely no doubts. But Sarah had doubts and knew that church membership gave the church authority over you—including the right to deal harshly with faithlessness.

She lived in fear that her doubts and failure to join a church would send her to hell. Sarah died at 33 when a trip to the dentist triggered lockjaw. She was still not a member of any church, but she never missed church. She rotated between four different ones, looking for that moment of certainty that never came.

So, your ancestors might not show up on a church disciplinary record at all, except as a tally for the bodies in seats on a Sunday morning. But there is a reasonably good chance they showed up regularly for sermons and social exchange. Again, we have to read around the specific mentions and read even when we have no reason to expect mentions.

And that is my main point today—a point I’ll make with other types of records in days to come. This is the major thing that will distinguish the genohistorian from the genealogist and the historian. We both search for our ancestors and read the world around them. Our work requires both.

Call to Action

As always, I ask you to comment on your experiences with church records. And share, if you have friends or colleagues who would appreciate this post. If you have not yet had the privilege of mining church records, start looking for some in your ancestors’ neighborhood. See if you can find them for their church, if you know where it was. The place of their burial might be a clue—or the place where they buried an infant years before their own death.

But also consider reading the available church records for all the churches in their neighborhood. If you are lucky enough to find the records of church disciplinary actions, you will find your understanding of the scope of their moral world taking shape. And we’d love to hear what you find.

If you are new to Genohistory on Purpose and wondering what it’s all about, welcome! I encourage you to view the first post: Genohistory: The Middle Ground on Purpose. Look for a signup form below or in a popup window and sign up to be notified of future posts. You will also receive access to my video: “Up and Running on Zotero in 25 Minutes.”

Researching Institutions

As we begin to reconstruct an ancestral world, we will encounter many institutions, including churches, schools, civic buildings, stores, and banks. I find it helpful to treat an institution as a research subject. In Zotero, my collection structure has a major folder called “PLACES.” In that, I organize what I find by this substructure:

PLACES

–> State

      –> County

              –> City/Town

                     –> Institution or Structure

I might collect information about the bridge my ancestor managed or the church he attended. This information is not about him, but about something that was important to him. And I know him better as I know about these structures in his life.

Genohistory on Purpose is supported in full by Golden Channel Publishing. Please show your support by shopping for this and other products of interest to genohistorians.

Share...