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And you thought collateral reading was just for college students!

Collateral reading. . .
Have you ever noticed how one book flows into the next? I mean if you're serious about research, you're checking all the references and end notes and traveling along a path covered with titles and authors, which in turn could end up in an InterLibrary loan list a mile long! The trick is to know when to stop searching & start writing.

Before starting this part of the project, I outlined what information I already had and made a list of objectives. That list is growing smaller. . . but there still  is room to grow. . . . Today I returned two ILLs and requested one more: David Henry Bradley's A History of the A. M. E. Zion Church.

Amy Muse's The Story of the Methodists in the Port of Beaufort (1941) didn't offer much to help with details of the churches in Township 5; but I did pick up a bit of information on travel and living conditions of that era, as well as a sampling of insights about conditions in the church circuit.

Update on church charters in NC. . .
Both repositories questioned offered the similar answers:

  1. The North Carolina State Archives' genealogy reference librarian referred me to Helen Leary's North Carolina Research: Genealogy and Local History's (with which I am already well acquainted): search Livingstone College's archives in Salisbury...however, we've already determined that the archives is closed, in disrepair, and lacking an archivist...
  2. Both the North Carolina State Archives' and New Bern-Craven County Public Library's special collections librarians referred me to the church...however, it has already been determined that documents prior to 1913 were lost in a church fire...
  3. The last and only option left would be to search the annual conference reports...as stated above, the AME Zion records held at Livingstone College are not available; however, the early Methodist Episcopal Church records, 1784-1984, are available at Duke University's archives. So, this last possible solution will have to wait until I can plan a research trip to Durham, NC...

Conclusions...
It seems that I have yet to complete my reading of Dark Salvation, followed by William E. Montgomery's Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South 1865-1900 (1993), followed by Christopher Rush's A Short Account of the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in America, John Jamison Moore's History of the A. M. E. Zion Church in America, J. W. Hood's One hundred years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and finally, Bradley's A History of the A. M. E. Zion Church.


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