Ireland Quaker team guidelines and objectives

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Contents 1 General objectives 2 Basics 3 Documenting sources and assumptions 4 Important additional Quaker records 5 Additional non-Quaker records 6 Feature profiles 7 Profiles for Irish Quaker women 8 Immigration and emigration 9 Irish Quakers who do not feature in the BMD records

General objectives

The Ireland Quaker Team is part of the Ireland Project and works as closely as possible with the Quakers Project.

Our general objective is to produce good, well sourced profiles for Irish Quakers, linked up with each other, with their Quaker relatives in other countries and non-Quaker relatives in Ireland so as to illuminate the repeated links between the families involved over many generations. We aim to do this while respecting Wikitree’s general principles of cooperation with and respect for other participants in Wikitree.

More specifically, we aim to

1. Add basic profiles for all the Irish Quakers featuring in the Irish Quaker BMD records with sources and categories.
2. Link these profiles together into a family tree that is as complete as possible for the families concerned and which illustrates the numerous repeated links between them.
3. Improve a substantial proportion of these profiles to include a basic biography with in-line sources.
4. Add additional information to these profiles where available within the Quaker record eg from testimonials, wills, sufferings, disciplinary and migration records or elsewhere eg from wills, deeds, land records, biographies and newspaper articles.
5. Create a subset of feature profiles for Irish Quaker ministers, founders of Irish Quaker families, those who suffered the most significantly, those who fell out with the Irish Quakers or were disowned and those who achieved prominence in society or in their field of interest.
6. Link these profiles with those of immigrant or emigrant families in collaboration with the Quaker Project and its members working on the countries concerned.
7. Link these profiles with those of their non-Quaker ancestors and descendants in collaboration with other members of the Ireland Project.

Note that these objectives are not strictly sequential; for example we are working to improve some profiles while still adding new basic profiles.

Basics

A basic Irish Quaker profile should show the person’s name, life events (birth, marriage, death) and relationships (parents, spouse, children) with sources, and include the Quakers sticker, the Irish_Quakers category, the category for the monthly meeting (or meetings) that the person belonged to and stickers from Space:Ireland_Badges_Templates_and_Stickers.

The Irish_Quakers category and sticker use these strings [[:Category:Irish_Quakers]] and {{Quakers Sticker}}. You can find the monthly meeting categories here Category:Quaker_Meetings,_Ireland.

Take care to avoid duplicates. Much of the interest in the Irish Quakers’ family tree lies in the multiple links between the different Quaker families over many generations. So even if you do not have time to add the family of the person whose profile you are working on, please take a moment to see whether profiles for their spouse, children or parents already exist. If so, join them up. If you find a spouse’s grandparents or a person’s grandchildren or siblings and do not have time to add the connecting generation, please add a note.

Documenting sources and assumptions

Irish Quaker sources and many other sources relevant to our profiles are documented here.

If adding a basic profile, there is nothing wrong with having bullet sources at the end.

In-line sources should be preferred where you have some detail in the biography.

Particularly where sources are behind a paywall (eg Quaker records on FindmyPast), it is a good idea to provide a short summary of the contents of a source so that those who do not have a subscription can see why it supports the profile contents. Please include a URL for sources that can be found on-line and a clear identification of the source – title, author, edition, page number etc. Paul Hancock has a spreadsheet for formatting Irish Quaker Sources from FindmyPast which he will supply on request. Tools like Wikitree Sourcer provide a good alternative to this, although the results may need correcting and tidying up. (For example Sourcer routinely provides a ‘Baptism’ record for Quakers who never baptised their children; please change these to ‘Birth’. Also its records for will abstracts are often garbled and can easily be improved.)

Points which are not clear, possible relationships to people featured in other Wikitree profiles and estimated dates should be explained in ‘Research notes’. This section is very useful for documenting your concerns or questions for the benefit of other researchers. Use it for example,

• If you cannot locate a birth, marriage or death record, please document this (eg, “No death record located”). This will save other researchers from duplicating your research.
• Explain how you estimated an individual’s birth year. There are various ways to do this. For example, 17th and 18th century, Quakers married on average at 25 for men and 24 for women – so you might estimate a birth year from a known marriage.
• If you are not sure that a source relates to the person concerned, or if a relationship is uncertain please spell this out with a note such as “Death record is tentative” or “Father is tentative”.

Please keep in touch with other members of the team, and other Wikitreers whose profiles you are working on, particularly if you are making significant changes or have questions. Please ask others in the team if you can’t find a source for something you are researching, do not have access to a source that you would like to consult or are not sure how to interpret the evidence you have found.

Important additional Quaker records

Although birth, marriage and death records are the basics, the Quaker records include important sources which we should refer to and incorporate into profiles when time allows. Principal among these are

• Origin stories contained in many of the early family lists (x served in the army with Cromwell, y came over to Ireland with her parents who were planters, z was convinced by the eminent preacher …)
• Testimonials to deceased ministers (… was a minister for 40 years …)
• Sufferings (x was sent to prison for taking part in a Quaker meeting, y had … taken from them as tithe …)
• Disciplinary records, records of investigations and their conclusions, ‘testimonies of denial’, papers of self-condemnation etc. In particular, there is a huge amount of material on ‘marriages out’ little of which is reflected in the marriage registers.
• Wills and inventories.

In time, it would be good to refer to these items in all the profiles of the people that they relate to.

Supplementing the Quaker archive are some significant diaries and biographies, which can also provide much of interest.

Depending on the circumstances, other items in the Quaker record which can be important depending on the context are

• Minutes relating to a person’s admission to the society
• Removal certificates
• School records
• Records of participation in meetings, particularly records of those who were particularly active as officers, teachers, historians etc.
• Records of relief efforts, for example during the war of the two kings or the great famine.

Additional non-Quaker records

Although we can tell a lot from the Quaker records, we also need to supplement them. Quaker records rarely tell us anything about a person’s trade or profession, their social status or their achievements in society. Some Quaker records are also missing or unclear, so that we need to fill gaps or confirm assumptions with other sources, and even within the largely Quaker family tree, some people left the Society or were disowned, only for their children to be re-admitted, so that non-Quaker records are required to fill in the gaps.

A wide range of primary and secondary non-Quaker sources including, wills, deeds, land records, newspaper reports, biographies and genealogies are described in our sources page.

Feature profiles

We should also showcase profiles of Irish Quakers who were particularly significant either in the Quaker context or in society more generally. In these cases, we should spend some time to pull together all the sources that we can to provide the best possible short biography of the person concerned with links to sources where the reader can find more. Some types of profiles to feature are

• Important Irish Quaker ministers
• Founders of Irish Quaker families, with where possible the foundation story – how their family came to be in Ireland, how they came to be convinced etc
• Those who suffered most significantly for their adherence to the Quaker cause
• Those who were disowned or expelled for the most striking or heinous offences or who split with the Irish Quakers in doctrinal or other schisms.
• Those who made significant scientific, artistic, literary, political or other achievements.

Some well-documented profiles (strongly biased towards early Quakers and the origin stories of the Irish Quaker families) are listed in Space Example profiles. There are links to the profiles of some other prominent Irish Quakers in 'The Irish Quakers: A People's History'.

Profiles for Irish Quaker women

Unfortunately, there is much less information available for Irish Quaker women than for men, so please make the most of the information that is available.

Immigration and emigration

Almost all Irish Quaker families came to Ireland from other parts of the British Isles, and many of their descendants moved back there or intermarried with British families. Many Irish Quakers also emigrated to Pennsylvania, to other parts of north America and to other parts of the world.

When your work on Irish Quaker profiles overlaps with the work of the Quaker project elsewhere, try to observe the Quaker project’s guidelines on sources and categorisation for profiles in the country concerned and take extra care to collaborate with Quaker project members who may be working on the same person’s profile or those for members of the same family.

When time and other priorities allow, we may organise joint efforts with the Quaker project to track some of the many families who emigrated from Ireland to north America and document their lives on both sides of the Atlantic.

Some existing profiles which may occasionally cause problems are those of the Irish ancestors of American Quaker families. Many of these have been set up by their American descendants, often relying on secondary sources of varying degrees of reliability. Where we can confirm the facts these contain from basic records and link them up to family members who remained in Ireland, so much the better – with the usual exhortation to communicate well. Where the primary sources disagree with, or provide no support for, the secondary sources cited, we need to proceed diplomatically and work out the best approach case by case, usually in consultation with the Quaker Project leadership.

Irish Quakers who do not feature in the BMD records

As we add more and more profiles from the Quaker family lists and other records of births, deaths and marriages, it becomes increasingly clear that there are large gaps in the early records. Large numbers of names appear in the meeting minutes or in the records of sufferings who are nowhere to be found in the family lists that remain today.

In some cases we can add profiles for these people with the limited information available from the minutes and sufferings, supplemented by what we can find from wills, deeds and so on. Some of these already exist. When we have added profiles for all the people in the BMD records, and gone back to improve their biographies, perhaps we will do more on these.