Church of the Redeemer (New Haven, Conn.) Records

The original finding aid for the collection, compiled by Calvert D. Morgan, Jr. provides the following description of the collection: The papers of the Church of the Redeemer arrived at the New Haven Colony Historical Society in fairly haphazard arrangement, having been stored, some for over a century, in boxes, bags, and even an old leather suitcase. Though a few had suffered minor water damage, and others needed cleaning, for the most part the papers had been well preserved; the vast majority were transferred directly into folders. The order into which the collection has been arranged reflects the historical organization of the church, and the fourteen individual series into which the papers have been divided serve as a guide to the church's operations as well as to the papers themselves. The most important body of information, the papers on the history of the church, are at the head of the collection, and the arrangement descends from there.

A few matters warrant special attention, either because of their exceptional nature or because they might not be immediately apparent to the researcher. First, it bears mention that in the 1930s, the Church of the Redeemer gave an important part of their papers to the Connecticut State Library; these were photostatically copied, and the bound copies returned to the church. Those volumes occupy the first two boxes of the collection. The papers in Series 2, Annual Reports to the Church 1843-1978, fall naturally into two halves. Before the year 1937, the reports were submitted individually, and remained scattered throughout the church files; but beginning in 1937, the reports were compiled into a booklet of Annual Reports. In most cases, we have two copies of this booklet; in many, one copy was the Pastor's personal copy, with his marginal notes and emendations.

The collection of Church Calendars, by far the largest single body of papers in the collection, presents a similar situation; along with the primary set of calendars covering 1893-1976, a separate set of calendars for the years 1939-1962 was kept by the church organist, and his notes make this set an important adjunct to the larger collection. The same procedure was followed for the set of Church Directories in Series 6; directories with emendations were kept along with clean copies wherever possible.

Finally, the body of papers which comprises Series 13 of the collection, and which I have called the Mimeographed Materials Scrapbooks Collection, merits a word of explanation. This part of the collection represents the effort of the Church Secretary to keep a record of everything which was mimeographed for church purposes between the years of 1929 and 1957. Though this is an impractical research tool, it is nevertheless an important and discrete part of the collection, and an invaluable resource for the study of those years. Furthermore, although many of the items in this series duplicate other items in the collection, much of the information is unique to this part of the collection; for instance, Series 13 stands as the sole detailed account of the doings of the church Forum for students during the 1940s and 1950s.

It is important to note that information within the records of the Church of the Redeemer, because of the record-keeping conventions of the Church, can occasionally be found in a number of places; probably the most important example of this difficulty is in the matter of such information as birth, baptism,marriage, and death records. By the logic of the collection, such information would naturally fall into the category of membership records, and thus should be found in the papers of Series 6. Yet because the church rarely kept separate records of such statistics, in most cases it would be more efficient to consult the records of the Advisory Board of the Church, or, in earlier cases, the records of the Church Clerk or the Standing committee. Similar situations may occur as well in the pursuit of other information; the researcher is encouraged to follow as many avenues as become necessary in order to get the most out of the collection.