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The Michigan Conference Archivists, Rebecca McNitt and Elizabeth Palmer, offer information on archiving church records.
We recognize that there are going to be mergers, closures, and disaffiliations of churches over the coming year, as well as beyond. When these happen, there will be church records that need to be either disposed of, moved to other churches, or sent to the archives. We are hoping to make these transitions as simple as possible for everyone involved.
The General Commission on Archives and History releases a Local Church Records Schedule roughly every four years. This schedule outlines what records should be held on a permanent basis, what should be held only for a certain number of years, and what should be disposed of (and when to do so).
We wanted to share this records schedule with you, as you have roles to play in these mergers, closures, and disaffiliations. In many cases, the archives are not made aware of closures of churches until the decision has been made and the churches are not necessarily aware of the guidelines relating to retention or disposal, leading to confusion, and sometimes to the transfer to the archives of routine, disposable records. Both of us are willing to answer questions about the retention or disposal of local church records to reduce the volume of materials to be transferred.
We are hoping in the future to be able to merge our two archival collections in a location which provides for the future growth in our holdings, but until that happens our space for new holdings at Albion College, Adrian College, and the overflow location at the former Salem church (containing records resulting from the merger of the two conferences) are all extremely limited.
We would also like to request that all reference and archives questions are sent to our work e-mails ([email protected] for Rebecca and [email protected] for Elizabeth) to make sure that questions are answered in a timely manner rather than getting lost in the shuffle of our personal e-mails.
Thank you for your assistance,
Rebecca McNitt, Detroit Annual Conference Archives
and
Elizabeth Palmer, West Michigan Annual Conference Archives