As a result of great faith and trust by Marnie Eason, Jerry Franklin and the church body of Ebenezer Baptist Church, I have received today the original minute books of the Ebenezer Baptist Church for transcription to the Schley Co. GenWeb site. The church sought a way to preserve the old minutes and at the same time make the contents available to anyone who cared to read them. The options included sending the minutes away to be filmed and I suspect that may still occur at some future date. The minutes transcription to GenWeb was chosen by the church as a method of preserving the old minute books and at the same time making them available to the masses via the internet. The minutes transcription was begun a year or so ago by a very resourceful and energetic volunteer. Because of circumstances, she had to curtail the transcription in Oct 1889. The church body has seen fit to entrust me to complete the transcription. I sincerely hope that I warrant their trust and I am excited about the completion of this project. As a part of this project I hope to supply a number of digital photographs so that all might experience portions of what the transcriber is seeing. These books are in wonderful condition and have been impeccably maintained. I am honored to copy and report the words of those who went before. The early minutes can be viewed at: http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/ga/schley/churches.html I shall be submitting the subsequent minutes in installments to the GASHLEY mailing list and I encourage those of you who might have some input on the contents of the minutes to help research and document what is recorded. Harris