Quakers were good at documenting families' movements to different locations. However, I've noticed some cases where, for example, the father is received at a new location, then the mother and son, and then a couple other children are independently listed as received on request, sometimes on the same day. I'm wondering if there was a requirement that children above a certain age had to independently request to be received at a new location. Does anyone have any ideas? Sharon

On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:23:28 -0500 (EST) LegmDavis@aol.com wrote: > Quakers were good at documenting families' movements to different > locations. However, I've noticed some cases where, for example, the >father is > received at a new location, then the mother and son, and then a >couple other > children are independently listed as received on request, sometimes >on the > same day. > > I'm wondering if there was a requirement that children above a >certain age > had to independently request to be received at a new location. > > Does anyone have any ideas? Sharon Sharon, First, I should say that there can never be rules to cover every situation, and even when rules exist, meeting clerks on the frontier might or might not be aware of them, so every answer about Quaker practice needs to start with a qualifier like "usually". Rules also differed from time to time and place to place. This business of membership transfer can be sliced a number of different ways. First, for the first two hundred plus years of Quakerism, women and men held separate business meetings. If a husband and wife with a number of children moved, I believe the meeting from which they were moving would typically write a single certificate for the whole family. On the receiving end, however, the males might be recorded in the men's minutes and the females in the women's minutes, although I think sometimes small boys got recorded on the women's side. It is only too common for either the men's or women's minutes to be lost, so we sometimes find only half a family in the records that survive. Things get more complex if the parents are not both members. A Quaker who married a non-Quaker would receive a visit from a committee appointed for the purpose, and would be given an opportunity to "condemn" his or her actions. (I don't suppose a man would say he was sorry he married his wife; he was more likely to apologize for how the marriage was accomplished. There's a joke that one groom said to his committee that he couldn't truthfully say he was sorry he married his wife, but he thought he could safely say he wouldn't repeat the offense.) The apology might come right away, and the Quaker spouse would retain membership. Otherwise the Quaker spouse would be "disowned", that is, lose Quaker membership. The apology could come years later, with the former Quaker parent regaining membership. Children born in the meantime would not be members. The apology had to be addressed to the body that did the disowning. If the family had moved in the meantime, letters would go back and forth. The person wishing to regain membership would write to the old meeting to ask forgiveness. The old meeting might ask a meeting nearer the petitioner's new home to appoint a committee to visit on their behalf. That committee would report back to their own meeting which would then write to the old home meeting. If reinstatement was approved at the old meeting, this would often be followed quickly by a transfer of membership to the meeting near the new home. So, in general, a person who is being received on his/her own request or on the request on one or both parents has never been a member before. Anyone who has once been a member has to be received back into the meeting that disowned him/her, and then request a certificate of removal. There are a few relatively rare situations, such as when the old meeting had been laid down, or had gone to the other side of a schism. Then we can sometimes see some improvisation on the part of meetings. My own gg grandfather was disowned by the Wilburite meeting he had belonged to for attending his brother's non-Quaker wedding and for taking part in a fistfight. He went to the Gurneyite meeting down the road and was received as a birthright member with no certificate. It is my impression (not based on any real study, though) that at least until recently, Quaker women who married non-Quakers tended to adopt the faith of their husbands, so more than half of those who regained their membership after being disowned for marrying contrary to discipline were men. There is also the case of the couple who were both Quaker, but who married outside of meeting, by a judge or another denomination's minister, for one reason or another. If she were pregnant, the slowness of the Quaker process might be an issue. In some states first cousins could legally marry but the meeting would not approve it. There were doubtless many other reasons, including the impetuosity of youth. Each member of such a couple would be paid a visit by their own committee, men to men, women to women. Each could decide independently whether to "condemn" his or her own actions, though doubtless most couples conferred. It is also possible for on partner in a marriage that was accomplished according to discipline and in meeting to have transgressed in some other way and been disowned later. Among the non-marriage disciplinary issues, some were almost exclusively male--joining the military, fighting, and running up unmanageable debts to name a few. Other's fell on the two sexes more nearly equally--attending dances, attending non-Quaker weddings, or joining another church for instance. Regarding children, a child born to parents who were both members would be counted a member from birth, and would not lose that membership through a parent's disownment. Children born to couples where one parent was a member and one was not were not automatically members. I think I have read that in some places and times a child's membership depended on the father's status. In the latter part of the 18th century, the Wrightsborough, Georgia, meeting did not know whether to include children with only one Quaker parent, so they appointed a committee to meet with each of them as ask what the child wanted. I don't know whether every such child were asked, or only those over a certain age. I'm also not sure if there was a hard an fast rule regarding which children were included in the family certificate, and which got their own. A child who lived outside the parental home might get a separate certificate whether or not he/she had reached the legal age of adulthood. An adult child who still lived in the parental home might be included on the parent's certificate. On the rare occasion of a mass migration, it is possible that several families might be on a single certificate. It's probably good to say something, too, about what it meant to be "disowned". It simply meant the person was no longer counted a member. Non-members could continue to attend Quaker worship, and families were not required to shun them or to exclude them from inheritance. Non-members could not attend meetings for business, and could not expect financial support from the meeting if they fell on hard times. Well, that's a longer answer to your question than you probably expected. I hope it's helpful nevertheless. -- Dan Treadway P. O. Box 72 Gilbert IA 50105 treadway@netins.net http://showcase.netins.net/web/treadway/