The Origins of Hinshaw’s Encyclopedia of Quaker Genealogy

The Origins of Hinshaw’s Encyclopedia of Quaker Genealogy by Ruth Priest Dixon* T TINSHAW’S Encyclopedia Of Quaker Genealogy has been a staple of ± A genealogical research for so long, it is difficult to imagine a time when it did not exist The first volume was published in 1936 by William Wade Hinshaw, and five additional volumes appeared by 1950. Its continuing importance is evidenced by the reprinting of Volumes I, II, and III by the Genealogical Publishing Company of Baltimore (GPC) in 1969, and Volumes IV, V, and VI in 1973. These editions were sold out The GPC then reprinted the six volumes in paperback between 1992 and 1994, and all volumes are currently available. One would not expect a work of this sort from a man with Hin¬ shaw’s public image. His lengthy obituary in the New York Times in 1947 gives extensive coverage to his career as an opera singer, and a scant four lines to his genealogical work.1 The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography2 gives only a few lines to this “hobby,” as it calls his monumental work, Early in life his musical talent became apparent In his teens he formed his own brass band, and later was choir director in a Presby¬ terian church, lead the singing at the Dwight L. Moody revival meet¬ ings, and in his twenties became Dean of the Music Department of his alma mater. He joined an opera company, was director of the Chicago Conservatory of Music, and formed his own opera company *Editor,$ Note: Ruth Priest Dixon M.A., C. G.R.S., is a volunteer staff aide at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Genealogical Publishing Co. has published two indexes she compiled from original Archives records: Index, Seamen’s Protection Certificate Ap¬ plications, Philadelphia, 1824—1861, and Index, Seamen’s Protection Certificate Applications, Philadelphia, 1796-1823. Her research on Hinshaw was prompted by a biography she is writing on Mijamin Priest , whose ancestors were Quakers in Penn's colony. 58 Hinshaw’s Encyclopedia of Quaker Genealogy 59 that toured the United States and Canada. In 1910 the forty-threeyear-old Hinshaw made his debut with the Metropolitan Opera Com¬ pany.3 Hinshaw came by his interest in Quakers honestly. He was a birth¬ right Quaker, attended Chester Meeting school, then the Friends Academy at New Providence, Iowa. In 1888 he graduated from Val¬ paraiso in Indiana with a B.S. in Civil Engineering, and in 1890 with a Bachelor of Music degree. In 1897 he earned a LL.B., and in 1901 a Ph.D.4 None of this would account for his interest in genealogy. In fact, Hinshaw became interested in his own family’s history in 1923 when Edna HarveyJoseph introduced him to the valuable Quaker monthly meeting records. As Mrs.Joseph’s research on Hinshaw’s family pro¬ gressed, it became apparent that tracking down all the necessary records was a time-consuming task. She suggested to Hinshaw that for the money being spent on his own family research he could have all the Quaker records copied.5 He set out to do just that and in large measure succeeded. Hinshaw discovered that “the genealogical lineages of all Friends who ever lived in America are hidden away in the thousands of books of minutes and records of all the Monthly Meetings which have ever existed in this countty” and that “in a few more decades most of these precious books will be illegible and/ or fallen to dust.”6 Hinshaw be¬ gan compiling the records of Quakers In North Carolina. He was fortunate in meeting Thomas W. Marshall, whose Quaker family roots went from Nantucket Island to North Carolina, where most of his personal research was done. Marshall had begun working on his family tree in 1895 after graduation from Purdue, when the depression forced him to work on his grandfather’s farm in Econ¬ omy, Indiana. According to his son,James P. Marshall, Hinshaw and Marshall probably were introduced by Miss Laura D, Worth of Guil¬ ford College, N. C.7 Miss Worth “devoted almost three years of pains¬ taking intensive effort” copying all the North Carolina material in Volume I from original records.8 Thomas Worth Marshall, a distant cousin of Laura D. Worth, was a civil engineer with offices in Washington, D. C., where he designed a number of public buildings, and was structural engineering con¬ sultant to the architect of the Capitol. He volunteered to plan and superintend the compiling of the data into alphabetical and chrono- 60 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine logical order, and was the compiler of the six volumes published by the Hinshaws. Beginning about 1932, Marshall made his office, his secretary Miss Margaret Norris, and the services of his son Whitfield H. (Pat) Marshall available to this project. Only Pat received any compensation. He worked on the project for a year after graduating from Duke University and continued while in George Washington University law school. Hinshaw wrote in the Foreword to Volume I, “Realizing that he possessed an unusually orderly mind, I urged him to continue work on my genealogical project at odd hours during his law study.*’9 In that pre-computer era, Pat Marshall devised an ingenious method of alphabetizing and organizing the entries in chronological order. This is how it worked: The copyists in the field entered their data in grey composition books like those used in grade school. The notebooks were reviewed by Thomas Marshall and Hinshaw, then living at the Mayflower Hotel a few blocks from Marshall’s office on Connecticut Avenue, These men thought it their duty to edit out any spicy tidbits which they considered irrelevant to genealogical re¬ search. For example, if a member were “disowned” for marrying out of meeting, the reason was included; if “disowned” for fornication, that was not. When the work of the copyists had been edited, Pat Marshall cut the pages into strips. He put the strips in order on a board then clamped them in place with a strip of wood along the left hand margin, and tightened it down with wing nuts. Miss Norris then typed the pages on a typewriter reserved for this project. The pages were sent to Ann Arbor, where lithographic plates were made from Miss Norris’s master copy.10 Originally Hinshaw planned to collect and compile the data and deposit one typed copy in the Library of Congress where it could be used by future researchers, but realizing that the only way to make these data accessible to the many thousands of Quaker descendants was to publish it in book form, a way was sought to finance it. While Hinshaw, who had a successful opera career and was married to the heiress of the Clyde Steamship Lines, had personal resources, he realized he could not finance such an undertaking. So an advertising campaign was begun. The National Genealogical Society Quarterly, whose editor Dr. G. M. Brumbaugh was an early supporter of the project, carried an editorial about it in June 1934, and in March of 1936 ran a two-page letter from Hinshaw describing Hinshaw*s Encyclopedia of Quaker Genealogy 61 the project and soliciting financial support. The price for Volume I was $20 with a $15 tag for advance purchasers. Hinshaw wrote that this was “less than 50 cents for each meeting’s full data” and “repre¬ sents less than one hour’s labor by a copyist.”11 A Philadelphia jour¬ nal, The Friend[ reprinted a letter from Hinshaw describing the book and stating that publication of a second volume was dependent upon the financial success of the first one.12 A nine-page advertisement was placed in The American Friend in May 1936, with a copy of the title page, an explanation of the publication, a subscription form, and sample pages from various Monthly Meetings. The American Friend published a facsimile of the first subscription which came on 21 April 1936 from E. E. Brownell, president of E. E. Brownell Engineering Co. of Philadelphia and Dayton, Ohio.13 Quakeriana Notes, a small publication about the “treasures new and old in the Quaker Collections of Haverford College,” began promot¬ ing the project in its Autumn edition, 1934, and continued with the publication of volumes II and III. One story makes it clear that work on several areas was carried on simultaneously. It noted in 1934 that the sponsors “have had fifteen copyists at work during the past year and have now covered practically all Monthly Meetings in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and Indiana. About half the work has been completed in Iowa and Kansas, and a beginning has been made in other states.” Cleo F. and Dorothy H. Thornburg played an important role in compiling the data. The sisters, tenth generation Quakers, began working on Hinshaw’s project soon after graduation from Earlham College. They began in Indiana in 1931, then worked on Ohio re¬ cords. In November, 1934, they began the four-year task of extracting Philadelphia data, first from the records at 302 Arch Street, then from the Race Street records at Swarthmore College.14 The Thorn¬ burg sisters continued working on the project through the publica¬ tion of the last volume. By this time, Dorothy had married and become Mrs. Fausey. Hinshaw had the support of “some of the finest men in all Quakerdom.” Dr. Harlow Lindley, Curator of History for the Ohio State Museum at Columbus, and Walter C. Woodward, editor of The Ameri¬ can Friend, Richmond, Indiana, were particularly singled out. Wood¬ ward not only promoted the Encyclopedia in his publication, but he also offered the services of the Friends Book and Supply House to 62 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine act as distributor without compensation above expenses, and to han¬ dle advance subscriptions to the book. Dorothea Clapp, Boston ge¬ nealogist, was another publicist whose columns in the Boston Transcript “brought the work to the attention of the world’* and pro¬ duced subscriptions from Europe and “from far-away Honolulu,” Hinshaw noted that “Dr. Gaius M. Brumbaugh . , . has ardently sup ported this work through his editorials in the National Genealogical Magazine. ” The first volume contained abstracts from the “Records and Min¬ utes of the Thirty-Three Oldest Monthly Meetings” in North Caro¬ lina. The Foreword by Hinshaw and the Introduction by Thomas W. Marshall give valuable information for each volume. Volume II, published in 1938, covered “Four of the Oldest Monthly Meetings” of the Philadelphia Yearly Meetings of Friends. In the Foreword, Hinshaw noted unexpected difficulties in compiling the Philadelphia records, due to the “hundreds of names listed which were exactly alike, or nearly so” without any indication of which fam¬ ily the person belonged to. He expressed appreciation to Dr. Thomas E. Drake of Haverford College, PA, for the historical sketches of meetings. Volume III, published in 1940, was devoted to “every item of ge¬ nealogical value found in all records and minutes (known to be in existence) of all meetings of all grades ever organized in New York City and on Long Island (1657 to the present time) including both Hicksite and Orthodox groups of the New York Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends.” Hinshaw states that “every item in this book was extracted from original books of Minutes and Records and compiled into alphabetical order by Mr, John Cox, Jr,,” who was custodian of the records of the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends and author of a book on New York Quakers. Volume IV and V were published simultaneously in 1946. Volume IV contains about half of the Ohio data, plus additional meetings in Pennsylvania, and one in Michigan. Volume V contains the other half of the Ohio extracts. Work on the Ohio records was under the super¬ vision of Dr. Harlow Lindley, Curator of History for the Ohio State Museum, Columbus, Ohio. Hinshaw estimated that there were more than a million individuals listed in the Ohio records. Hinshaw’s death on 27 November 1947 in Washington, D. C., a year after the publication of Volumes IV and V, did not put an end Hinshaw s Encyclopedia of Quaker Genealogy 63 to his great work. Volume VI, covering the Quaker meetings in Vir¬ ginia, was published in 1950 with Thomas W. Marshall continuing as editor. This volume, plagued with the ill health of Marshall who died two years later as well as illnesses of compilers, was published by Mrs. Hinshaw. She decided, however, not to continue with additional pub¬ lications and sent the material already compiled to the Friends His¬ torical Library of Swarthmore College where it was placed in The William Wade Hinshaw index to Quaker Meeting Records. More¬ over, she made it possible to have the data indexed on some 285,000 three-by-five-inch cards and filed.15 This index of unpublished mate¬ rial covers 307 meetings, primarily in Indiana (86) , Iowa (84) , Kansas (49), Pennsylvania (13), and New Jersey (4).16 Other material came from Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Nonetheless, according to the Library, the majority of Friends meetings are not abstracted in either the Encyclopedia or the index. In 1960, ten years after the publication of Volume VI, the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis decided to publish a seventh vol¬ ume, and in 1962 published Abstracts of the Records of the Society of Friends in Indiana, Part I.17 Edited by Willard Heiss, it is subtitled Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy (Volume VII). Heiss, like subsequent researchers, noted that errors and discrep¬ ancies existed in Hinshaw’s abstracts, and researched the original Indiana records again. Recognizing that the fruits of Hinshaw’s re¬ search are secondary sources, careful researchers will follow Heiss’s example. Notes 1, New York Times, Friday, 28 November 1947, p. 27, col. 5. 2. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (John T. White & Co., 1953; reprint, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilm, 1967), 38: 635—37; hereafter cited as Cyclopaedia. 3. “The Singular Life of William Wade Hinshaw,” The American Friend, n.s., 24, no. 11 (28 May 1936): 214-15. 4. Cyclopaedia, 38: 635. The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine 64 5. Willard Heiss, ed,, Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1962) , 7: v. 6. William Wade Hinshaw, Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy (1936; re¬ print, Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1969) , I: v; hereafter cited as Hinshaw. 7.James P. Marshall, retired civil engineer. Interview with author, Collington, Mitchelville, Md., 21 October 1993. 8. Hinshaw, I: vi. 9. Ibid. 10.James P. Marshall interview. 11. “Quaker Records,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly, 22, no. 2 (June 1934): 52; 24, no. 1 (March 1936): 9-11. 12. “Genealogical Records,” The Friend, (Fifth Month, July 1936): 423. 13. Advertisement for “Volume I of William Wade Hinshaw’s Encyclopedia of Quaker Genealogy,” in The American Friend, n.s., 24, no. 11 (28 May 1936). 14, Rayner W. Kelsey, ed., Qiiakeriana Notes (Autumn 1934): 1—2; (Sixth Month 1939): 15; (Sixth Month 1940): 5. 15. Willard Heiss, ed., Abstracts of the Records of the Society of Friends in Indiana (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1962), 1: iii, v. 16. Form letter from Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa,, responding to genealogical inquiries.