Church records

The statistics in this study are drawn primarily from nine towns (Map I). They are the only towns in the valley that have lost no more than one set of church records and were identified with the help of the inventory of Vermont church records compiled by the Historical Records Survey of the Works Progress Administration. The inventory indicates the contents of all records located by the survey and their location in 1940, and it lists all records known to have been lost or destroyed. The inventory is not perfect. A handful of unlisted records still exists, and several records have been lost or destroyed since 1940.

Almost all church records in the towns studied intensively have survived, and few of these are incomplete. Still, the use of these records poses several problems. First, evangelical denominations (Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Freewill Baptist, Christian) and nonevangelical denominations (Unitarian, Universalist) had different criteria for determining membership. Evangelicals distinguished between membership in a church, which was open only to those who experienced conversion, and membership in a religious society organized to support worship locally, which was open to all who attended church regularly and contributed a designated fee annually for support of the minister and maintenance of church property. Nonevangelicals, by contrast, had no separate “church” organization. People who attended regularly, paid religious levies, and joined religious societies were recognized as members.