Quaker Records (General)

by rookancestrybest , United Kingdom, Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 23:40 (5093 days ago) @ Peter Preece

The Society of Friends has very good records. I have found Quakers very helpful when looking at information for some Quakers in my family. (My family seems to have had a wide number of denominations of Christianity in it and I have found it fascinating to find this out!) I think if you just Google "Quaker records" you will find the links but if you are stuck I will look back at the sites I have found useful.Also try: http://www.hmwquakers.org.uk/html/ross_burial_ground.html and of course www.hmwquakers.org.uk
Explore I http://www.quaker.org.uk/library too.
I also found some local Quakers, who I met by chance, were extremely helpful in searching records on my behalf. There are also a number of Quaker trades.
Quakers did move around quite a lot, working for other Quakers and moving to where other Quakers lived and to marry. You need to bear in mind that some people were not fully fledged Quakers, they could attend Meetings without being officially Quakers and the records of these are not easy to trace. I would need to check but there is a special term for them, - there are some records of them if they attended meetings. There are good records of Quaker cemeteries and of their members. However I have also discovered that they are not the only denomination who called their places of worship the "Meeting House" as I have found that some early Methodists and Presbyterians also called their places of worship this too. I know that for yet another branch of my family it took a while to establish whether the family were Quakers, Presbyterians or early Methodists and found that the latter and neither of the former options proved to be the case.

P.S. Look at:
http://www.fordean.freeserve.co.uk/rosspm.htm - it states that a James Merrick in Ross On Wye was a Quaker whose house was used for meetings in the mid-1600s...