Master List
of Finding Aids: Organizations Category
Manuscripts:
Organization Records
Church
Labor
Women's
Ever since the original
Providence Proprietors started dividing up their land in 1638, Rhode
Islanders have been forming private groups to accomplish their goals. Our
manuscripts holdings include records of a wide variety of organizations:
charitable groups such as Dexter
Asylum, the Providence Shelter for
Colored Children; social service and activist groups such as Direct Action
for Rights and Equality (DARE); civic groups such as the Providence Board
of Trade and the League of Women
Voters; clubs and societies
including the Independent Order of Odd
Fellows, the Rhode Island Medical Society and the Ann Eliza
Club. Special attention should be devoted to
our extensive collections of church records, labor union records, and
records of women’s groups.
Church Records
The Library has manuscript records of many Rhode Island
churches, with particular strength in records of Baptist and
Congregational churches. Among the most comprehensive collections are the
General Six Principle Baptist Archives and the records of the First
Universalist Church of Providence, Congdon Street Baptist Church, and the
First Congregational Church of Providence. The extensive archives of the
First Baptist Church in America are on deposit and can be accessed only with permission of church historian Dr. J. Stanley Lemons, History
Department, Rhode Island College, 600 Mount Pleasant Ave., Providence,
Rhode Island
02908.
The Archives of the New England Yearly Meeting of the Society of
Friends (the Quakers) are housed at the Rhode Island Historical Society
Library. They are a separate institution, but the collection can be
accessed via the RIHS staff and most of the early vital records can
be accessed via microfilm in the Reading Room. The records cover most of
the Quaker meetings in New England from 1676 to the present, and consist
mainly of vital records and meeting minutes. Questions can be directed to
the NEYM Archivist at
neym@rihs.org.
The 113-page Guide to the Records of the
Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in New England was published in
1997 and is available for sale at the Rhode Island Historical Society.
For more information about the New
England Yearly Meeting, visit their website.
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Labor
The Rhode Island Historical Society began collecting the records of labor unions
in the 1970's and has developed an extensive collection with the support
of the Rhode Island Labor History Society and labor historian Scott
Molloy. The records now extend back to the founding minutes of the
Providence Typographical Union in 1856, and include the records of more
than thirty unions, such as locals of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and the
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers
Union.
Also included are personal papers of activists such as Larry Spitz and
Joseph Coldwell. Most of these resources are
explained in more detail by A Guide to the Historical Study of Rhode
Island Working People, published in 1996 by the Rhode Island Labor
History Society. Many of the extensive
business records are also useful for examining the other side of the business-labor
relationship, and they often include personnel records for researching
specific workers.
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Women’s organizations
Almost thirty
women’s organizations, ranging from the Providence Female Charitable
Society (established 1799) to the Women’s Liberation Union (established
1970), are represented in manuscripts collections. The largest collections are from the
Young Women’s Christian
Association (YWCA), the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the
League of Women
Voters. Also noteworthy are the records of the
Providence
Physiological Society, an 1850's group founded by Paulina Wright Davis
which held lectures on women’s rights and anatomy.
The most comprehensive access to manuscript
materials is through a paper card catalog located in our Reading
Room. A complete listing of our manuscript collections and detailed
inventories for many of them are available in the Reading Room. Electronic
versions of the detailed inventories are also available through the Master
List of Finding Aids page.
Please
contact the Reference Librarian for more
details about the manuscript collections for which there is no detailed
inventory available on this website.
Other related papers can be found
elsewhere in the collection. In particular, many collections of
personal
papers have similar content. If you are looking for something in
particular, please
contact the Reference Librarian so we can consult our extensive catalogs at the library.
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