|
The Preacher’s Corner
By Rev. Dr. Milton Winter News not only travels fast, it travels far News
can travel fast. I learned that when I asked out my first college date.
The men’s dorm, where I had made the call from the hall pay phone (yes,
this was indeed the “dark ages”), was about half a ball field’s length
away from the dining hall. I hung up the phone
and walked to the cafeteria, and every girl there already knew. Till
then, I never realized what a desirable guy I was! Onto
more prosaic subjects, I have been transcribing and annotating the
handwritten 19th century records of the Presbyterians of North
Mississippi. Now, there’s a sleeper I know! But to me, it is an
interesting exercise, and therapy. I must need lots of therapy because
the project is now into hundreds of typed pages. I
undertook the project because one of my duties in my part-time job in
our regional office at Camp Hopewell, near Oxford, is to field requests
for historical information. You would be surprised at how many such
requests we receive. Some of them concern property locations and title
searches. Recently they wanted to build a natural gas pipeline through
the site of one of our abandoned churches. There is a cemetery,
however, and this complicates the matter greatly. Other
requests come from people doing genealogical research. The family
history bug seems to bite when you are in your late 50s, just after all
the people you could ask have passed on. So you start doing the work
“the hard way,” which means consulting old records, when before you
could have easily asked Grandma. The “bug” has bitten me in the worst
kind of way, and so I am sympathetic with others who have the same
concern. By the way, the Bible is full of
genealogies, which most people skip over when on one of those quixotic
“cover to cover” Bible-reading marathons. But the genealogies are
interesting. Literalists claim them when arguing that the Bible teaches
that the earth is only 5,000 years old and that Jesus was a linear (and
fully traceable) descendant of King David, not to mention Adam and Eve.
I don’t want to argue about all that, but here I will simply say that
our spiritual ancestors thought that family trees were important. A lot
of Biblical ink is devoted to that subject. My
own quest to establish genealogical bragging rights came to a grinding
halt, with the discovery of the inevitable “skeleton in the closet.” It
seems my paternal grandmother’s ancestors, the Arringtons, arrived in
Virginia in the 1650s. That is almost as good as arriving on the
Mayflower! But I turned to the next page in the
record, and found that my long-ago ancestor had been convicted before
the magistrate there in Smithfield, Virginia ,(where the wonderful hams
come from) and branded a felonious thief! “Blood will tell,” as they
say. I have developed the skill of reading
old-time handwriting. Some of our old North Mississippi church records
are beautifully written, but most indicate that the “honor” was given
to the oldest member present. Still, these fragile, old books are full
of interesting names, and records of churches established and
congregations faithful. Sometimes there are sad stories. Presbyterians
argued about the most peculiar things in the long ago — perhaps those
who come after will say the same about our present-day quarrels.
Reading history does give a perspective. Anyhow,
as to my first sentence, about “news traveling fast,” I have posted the
results of my labor on our website: www.standrewpresbytery.org and
would you believe it, the other day there came an email from a
gentleman in Illinois, who had “discovered” his great-great grandfather
and was so thrilled. I have material about lots of people’s
great-grandfathers, if they want to pursue the subject. The work is fun
for me, and in one case, we turned up a piece of abandoned property out
in the woods down in Lafayette County that the presbytery was able to
sell and it netted $40,000 that we put in our “New Church Development”
fund. Who would have thought that someone Googling away in Illinois
would find such things online from Mississippi? So I guess news not
only travels fast, it travels far.
|
