Caring for Archives is not rocket science:
One parish's experience




Adapted from The Coastline and reprinted in The Historiographer, Christmas 2007
By The Rev. S. Albert Kennington

Mobile, Al

I grew up in the days before air-conditioning drove us inside and televisions shut down family conversations. Listening to my father and grandfather tell stories on the porch on balmy (or even muggy) evenings was fascinating entertainment for me. I grew up loving stories. I love hearing them, reading them, writing them, telling them.

When I came to Trinity Church, Mobile, in the summer of 1974 as a deacon-in-training, I quickly discovered I had come into a thicket of stories. Moving the church "brick by brick" from downtown to its present location was a favorite story, and there were plenty of tellers.

Parish secretary Rita Robinson eagerly introduced me to the treasury of stories in the parish archives. The sacramental registers of Trinity Parish begin in 1845 and continue to the present without interruption. The archives has the original bids for construction fo teh church in 1853. Vestry minutes on file date from the 1880's. The weekly newsletters on file date from the 1940's although a few are from the 1880's. Notebooks and scrapbooks and albums tell the stories of the early Women's Auxiliary events and Sunday School outings. Some of my predecessors left hand-written accounts of the beginning of Church of the Good Shepherd, Mobile (whose first communicants were confirmed in Trinity in 1854), of St. John's Church, and of various changes to the interior of our church building.

The founding rector, Dr. Joshua Albert Massey, left a hand-written sermon he preached on his 31st anniversary as rector in which he recounted some of the highlights of his tenure, 1848-1879. Most remarkable is what he did not include: He said nary a word about building the church nor the Civil War. He did talk about the mission and ministry of the church. Wow! What priorities!

When the present parish house was built in 1961, the vestry provided a walk-in vault with reinforced walls and a steel door. It is a reasonably fire-safe, water-safe, wind-safe, and climate controlled room, and it is a central place in our office. Our archives, including the ones we are making now, take up most of the room. Over the years, I have come to know the contents of this room intimately, and I have been blessed to serve a parish with so much of its story so well preserved and accessible.

For several months last year, a team of parishioners and rector made some improvements in our vault. We tore out the old acid-producing wood shelves and replaced them with open-grill steel shelving. We removed reams of paper records from rusting binders, threw away the paper-clips, and bound thse papers with acid-free cloth tape. We put them in acid-free archival storage boxes with the papers lying flat rather than standing up. We sorted by size and subjects an extensive photograph collection and replaced it in acid-free albums and file boxes, clearly labeled and easily accessible. Of all the work, this was the most fun. Now it is easy for folks to come and "look at the pictures."

We already owned two fire-safe filing cabinets. We keep all the registers in them, including the current sacramental and attendance registers. Our office discipline is to make sure every register is in the vault before we close at day's end, every day. These filing cabinets also include an extensive collection of papers, service leaflets from ordinations and other special occasions, and an individual file on each rector, each bishop, and some curates since 1845.

We spent around $1,000 on this project and still have a little more work to do. The money was given in memory of two women in the parish, both of whom were tellers and preservers of Trinity's story, Josie Crum Roberts and Kathryn Park McPherson. Mrs. McPherson served as our parish archivist for several years and charged me a few days before her death to "finish the job."

Caring for archives is not rocket science. The task begins with caring and gets done with a little work and a little money. The terms "acid-free," "low humidity," "dim light," "gloves," "fire-safe," "dry," and "order" are the rules of the task. Having a walk-in vault is a luxury, not a necessity. Home improvement stores sell safes at affordable prices, and used fire-safe cabinets can be bought at some office supply stores. As for money: Remember memorials!

The job takes time, lots of time - not because the work is long and tedious, but because the work is fun. The archivist finds a story with each photograph, each set of minutes, each letter. The story's the thing. Way back in 1974 when Mrs. Robinson showed me through the old registers, she pointed out an entry in a burial register where the cause of death for one man was: "Got his head cut off by the railroad." It coudl have come straight out of the Old Testament if they'd had railroads then. I whispered a prayer for him and then, God forgive me, thought, "Now there's a story!"

The Rev. Albert Kennington, retired rector of Trinity Church, Mobile, and a member of the Registrar-Historiographer's Team of the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, is the author of From the Day of Small Things, his telling of the story of Trinity Church.



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