New Brunswick Church Histories (National Institute)

Church Histories
We don’t think of individual church histories as potential sources of family data, unless we are researching a minister who served in a community. However, they may be worth checking. There is usually information on the burial ground or grounds, and where and when each was in use. I have seen photographs with gravestones just barely legible, and frankly, you never know until you look.

Between the Canadian centennial (1967) and the provincial bicentenary (1984), a lot of small churches were inspired to put together their history. Typical of the genre is The History of the United Baptist Church at Penobsquis (Moncton 1981), by Grace McLeod and Phyllis Hall. It is somewhat curiously organized, filled with names, dates and early photographs but lacking an index and poorly bound (my copy is shedding pages). Nearby, The Sussex Corner Bicentennial Committee compiled the History of Sussex Corner July 1984, edited by former teacher W. Harvey Dalling, curator of the Kings County Historical and Archival Society Inc. museum at Hampton. Two of the 32 pages are devoted to churches, eight to education, with a list of teachers from 1855.

More scholarly productions are Peter Penner’s The Chignecto ‘Connexion’: The History of Sackville Methodist/United Church (Sackville: Sackville United Church, 1960), which is well indexed, and Shirley A. Dobson’s The Word and The Music: The Story of Moncton’s Central United Church and Its Methodist Roots (Moncton: Central United Church, 1994), a valuable study of early Methodism in Chignecto, as well as a church history, but no index.

A useful little guide-book to churches and church locations is by Roger M. Holdsworth, Faith of our Fathers: The Story of New Brunswick’s Centennial Churches and of early religious life in the Maritimes (St. Stephen: self-published, n.d.). It contains a brief history of the various denominations active in the province and a list of 184 “Centennial Churches”, their location, name, denomination and date. If someone was a minister, or Deacon, or ran the Ladies’ Aid, these very local histories can undoubtedly be found at the local library or possibly accessed through the denominational archive. ________________________________________

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