Hear ye, hear ye–if ever there were a resource for myth-busting about the puritans of Woodland New England, it’s got to be the records kept by Congregational churches from the 1600s through the 1800s. Congregationalism was the denomination formed by the puritans who left England, and, as its name tells us, it was based on the independence of each local congregation. There was no hierarchy of priest or minister, vicar, bishop, archbishop. Orders did not flow from the top down to local churches. Each individual congregation completely governed itself–chose its minister and church officers, dismissed them if/when necessary, handled its own internal disagreements (cases of discipline), and provided/requested advice to/from other congregations.

This was revolutionary, and Congregationalism itself is fascinating. It’s still around, of course, but its high point of influence ended in the mid-1800s. We’ll be sharing more about Congregationalism in the coming weeks because it has a huge impact on our understanding of the puritans and the nation that their descendants did so much to ideate in the mid- and late-1700s during our Revolutionary period.

The problem with our understanding is that those church record books, which detailed not only all births, marriages, and deaths but also all church meetings, personal notes, letters, etc., of the congregation, were not available to the public, or even to scholars, because they had been locked away for safekeeping and completely forgotten. Or totally lost. Even when they were close at hand they weren’t easy to read. So tens of thousands of pages–hundreds of thousands–of puritan and Woodland New England history were effectively missing from our historical record, leaving scholars to extrapolate from a tiny fraction of records. An enormous scholarly canon was founded on scraps, and since there were so few primary sources around to contradict the scholars when they went wrong, scholarly opinion was eventually taken as fact–a kind of primary source in itself.

Then came New England’s Hidden Histories. This is a digital history project sponsored by the Congregational Library and Archive in Boston that’s now in it’s 12th year of finding, digitizing, and transcribing Congregational church records. It’s an amazing resource that is already blowing the scholarly world wide open and challenging ideas about the puritans and their religion that have been accepted as self-evident fact for 150 years. It’s free and open to the public, so while not all the records that you’ll find on the website have been transcribed, more are arriving every season, and what’s there already will keep you busy for a long time.

You just go to New England’s Hidden Histories at the Congregational Library and Archive website to get started. As noted above, we’re going to be diving into some of the records to share amazing new data that challenges many of the ideas about puritans that people hold dear–that they were punitive, excommunicating people who hated happiness and lived only to judge and hurt others… and that they were all white.

Get a head start on us–go to NEHH and check it out!