The following links in blue are provided to aid in accessing AECST digitized materials.
Christ Church
Digitizing Philadelphia’s Historic Congregations: A CLIR- Funded Project
A new archival project spearheaded by Christ Church Preservation Trust will provide new portals into the relationship between religion and politics in the 18th and early 19th centuries, perhaps offering more insight into colonial America than any other published body of work.
OPenn
Philadelphia Congregations Early Records
ATLA (American Theological Library Association)
Philadelphia Congregations Early Records Project
Six Philadelphia congregations and three collecting institutions have formed a collaboration to scan and make available online the historic records of eleven of Philadelphia’s oldest congregations. These include vestry minutes; registers documenting births, baptisms, marriages and burials, pew rents, sermons from the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, Christ Church, Congregation Mikveh Israel, First Baptist Church, First Presbyterian Church, Gloria Dei Church, Second Presbyterian Church, St. George’s United Methodist Church, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, and Third Presbyterian Church. This project is supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s Hidden Collections Initiative for small Archival Repositories:
Philadelphia Area Archival Research Portal (PAARP), formerly the PACSCL Finding Aids Site referencing St. Thomas’ archival collection.
Below is a list of the items that were digitized:
Research Find:
Historian Dr. Nicholas P. Wood, Assistant Professor of History, Spring Hill College, while checking a quote from Absalom Jones’s and Richard Allen’s
“A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures Thrown Upon Them in Some Late Publications” (1794) - the first book copyrighted by African Americans - discovered that a copy available at Archive.org includes a scrap of paper that appears to be a rare surviving example of Jones's handwriting. (Sadly, it's about the death of a child.)
The copy is from the National Library of Medicine, and available here:
https://archive.org/details/2559020R.nlm.nih.gov/page/n31