Church • 477 Records • Uploaded November 30, 2022
The Delaware Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church was established in 1864 for African American Methodists in Delaware and the Mid-Atlantic region that included parts of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It continued until 1965 when it became part of the Peninsula-Delaware Conference of the United Methodist Church. The geographic boundaries changed over the years and it sometimes overlapped with other Conferences. This abstract includes anyone with a connection to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia through either birth, death or service on the Eastern Shore. The memoirs or obituaries in this abstract are taken from the Minutes of the Delaware Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church journals from 1865 – 1950. The memoirs often include details such as birth and death dates and locations, spouses, parents, children and other family members. It also may include Civil War service, education and church offices the individuals held, along with the charges in which they served. There are also pictures of a few of the individuals. This abstract focuses only on the Memoirs; but, they are only a tiny part of the journals themselves. The contents of the journals evolved and increased over the years and contain a wealth of information about the members and the individual charges, circuits and the churches. The daily activities of the Annual Conferences, church memberships, and committee reports, such as Education, Freedman’s Bureau, and Missionary, to name only a few, greatly add to the understanding of the people and their activities throughout the region. The connections of people throughout the region extended into Wilmington, Philadelphia, New York and other areas, even with the limited communication and transportation systems of the time, are illustrated by the travels of the ministers and their families. The majority of the journals up to 1965 are freely available online through either the Barratt’s Chapel Archives in Frederica, Delaware https://www.barrattschapel.org/archives--library.html or the Haithi Trust Digital Library https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433082254172&view=1up&seq=9 Anyone wanting to learn more about the activities of the people and their churches can use the links to the Delaware Conference journals that are included in this database.
The list below shows the data fields included in this source. If a field is marked as Indexed, it is searchable.