One of the many reasons I’m proud to be descended from Quakers and still consider myself one, even though I don’t believe in their god, is our meticulous record keeping. Every congregation holds a monthly meeting where, in addition to the business of running a church, they record births, deaths and marriages. Most of these Monthly Meetings have had their genealogical data extracted, indexed and cataloged, so this morning I was reviewing the records from the Sugar Plain Monthly Meeting in Boone County, Indiana, since that was where Samuel Barker went after leaving North Carolina. I found a minute from June 3rd, 1882 indicated that Sammy and his children had been “granted a certificate” to join the Spicewood Monthly Meeting. Unfortunately, I could not find Spicewood in any of the compiled collections.

Knowing he moved to Hamilton County at about this time, I reviewed those monthly meetings and found another minute, this one from the Westfield Monthly Meeting on April 28th 1887 indicating Samuel and his wife Alice and children were “received on certificate” from Spicewood Monthly Meeting. At some point during those five years Grandpa Sammy married this Alice!

I asked the Earlham Friends Collection staff, if they knew where I could find the Spicewood records and they were sure they had something. A few minutes later a young lady dropped a couple of old ledger books on my table. Apparently no one has extracted the genealogical records so they gave me the actual handwritten 130 year old records to review!

I spent a couple of fascinating hours reading these minutes but could not find the marriage record. Samuel Barker appears frequently, mostly representing the meeting to the Quarterly Meeting, the next level up the Quaker hierarchy, or visiting fellow members. Then there’s a minute that Alice Barker made a request to join the meeting with several others.

Sometimes you when you search, you only find new questions.