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I have been looking in vain for information on the internet about the early Presbyterian Church. I come from several lines of Scotch-Irish or Puritan/Presbyterian colonialists. I was finding all of the names of congregations confusing because they don't always correspond with a geographical name you can look up on a map, like "Tinkling Spring" and "Fagg's Manor." I also found that I kept running into the same minister's names, although my research was taking me to many different states -- Pennsylvania, Virginia, North/South Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio and New Jersey. So I decided to try to track them down and put what I learned on the web.
The information is coming (right now) from the Encyclopedia of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America: Including the Northern and Southern Assemblies, Alfred Nevin, D.D., LL.D., Editor, Philadelphia (Presbyterian Encyclopedia Publishing Co., 1884).
Most of the information is verbatim, but not all the information in the given article is necessarily reproduced. The work's copyright has expired, so it is now in the public domain. I have not transcribed all the information in each article, particularly in the biographies. I only deleted flowery language about the subject's dedication to God and his uprightness which, after reading several of the articles, seemed repetitive. I have eliminated none of the biographical detail.
Please also note that the Nevin's version of Presbyterian History is a highly sanitized one. He barely refers to disputes which led to church schisms and none of the ministers he writes of ever deserved being removed from a congregation. All of the good and barely a hint of the bad seemed to be his byword. I intend to eventually annotate these biographies with facts which Nevin has left out.
Also, please note that references to "negroes" and "Indians" in Nevin's work reflect a 19th century (Scotch-Irish, white) worldview and not my own attitudes.
- Aprille Cooke McKay
Note from current webmaster Malcolm Humes: These pages existed on a University of Michigan web server from approximately 2002-2005. In early 2006 I discovered the pages were offline but referenced in many Google searches I did on genealogy. I contacted Aprille McKay and asked if it was ok to host the pages because it was clear they had great historical and genealogical value and have presented them here with her permission. Much of this was originally sourced from material in the public domain and other parts were contributed by readers of her original site.
I encourage discussion of these pages and use of this site for ancestors to connect and share notes. I welcome supplementary material and links to related sites but it is not my intent to manage and update these pages regularly. Please use the discussion boards for comments, suggested updates, to connect with other descendants, and for discussions of the content here.
Much like Aprille, I have found that tracking my family history involves tracking the churches they belonged to and understanding the context of their religion helps me. Also I have many ancestors in families related to or possibly related to a number of the early PA Reverends listed in these pages, with particular interest in the Finley, Graham, Kennedy, Kerr families and with many of my family roots at Paxton Church, Old Hanover Presbyterian, Head of Christiana and other churches listed here. I am not an expert on the info offered here and do not have the books that this material was sourced from. I was raised at times as a Quaker and at times as a Presbyterian and my early PA Quaker heritage is also important to me.
I do have other resources on some of the related churches here that I hope to eventually share online also.
When I asked Aprille if I could host these pages I had little idea of the scope of them. Some of these pages are up to 2000 lines in length and pulling these pages from Google's cached copies created a need for hours of editing. I can only imagine the hundreds of hours Aprille probably put into creating these pages originally. I have found and corrected hundreds of typos but in many cases the place name variations and some typos do not leave an obvious answer as to what they should be. In other cases I may have corrected older English spellings with some hesitation, but it's clear that the original source material was also modified to offer this online in a more modern context. There is an incredible amount of material here with easily more than 20,000-30,000 lines of text. I had no idea how much effort it would be just to copy and edit the pages to offer them here, and I thank Aprille Cooke McKay for her work on the original project and for her willingness to let me share these pages again.
I'm aware that there may still be some formatting errors with bolded and colored text. The search feature probably doesn't work at this time, and there are probably many typos and some broken links. I'll create a section on the discussion board to be used for reporting problems and suggested updates. I also welcome discussions of specific churches and Reverends and their families and flocks and for you to use this site as a way to connect to other descendants if you are related to people mentioned here.
- Malcolm Humes, April 2006
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