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Amy Grace Mekeel papers concerning Conservative Friends, New York Yearly Meeting
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Held at: Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College [Contact Us]500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 19081
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in their reading room, and not digitally available through the web.
Overview and metadata sections
Amy Grace Mekeel was a birthright member of Hector Monthly Meeting (Conservative), great-granddaughter of Jesse and Amy (Quimby) Mekeel and daughter of Jesse and Rebecca Owen Mekeel. She received her BA in 1910 from Cornell University and taught at Friends Boarding School, Barnesville, Ohio, after graduation. She subsequently earned Masters and PhD degrees from Cornell and taught zoology at Cornell from 1917-1947. She was one of the founders of the Ithaca worship group and became its first treasurer when the meeting was formally organized as the Ithaca Association of Friends in 1926. It became Ithaca Monthly Meeting in 1938, a united meeting.
After her retirement from teaching, Mekeel became interested in the history of Quakers in the Scipio Quarter of New York Yearly Meeting and their divisions. Hector Monthly Meeting was established in 1822 by Farmington Quarter. After the Separation of 1828 there was another Separation in the Orthodox faction, resulting in an Orthodox (Gurneyite) and Conservative (Wilburite) branches. In 1859, the Conservative branch split again, yielding Kingite and Otisite meetings. These meetings reunited as Conservative in 1881 and ceased to meet after 1955. Amy Grace Mekeel's parents were members of the Kingite faction of Hector Monthly Meeting.
She was distantly related to Arthur J. Mekeel (1909-2005), Quaker activist and historian.
The collection contains primarily Mekeel's notes and abstracts concerning Quaker meetings in the Scipio and Farmington Quarterly Meetings and some correspondence with Percy Clapp, Keeper of the New York Yearly Meeting records and fellow Cornell graduate.
Gift of New York Yearly Meeting, 1997
When the deposit of New York Yearly Meeting records was initially proceesed, Mekeel's correspondence with Percy Clapp, Keeper of the NYYM Records, was filed in Biographical reference, PG 7. With the processing of her abstracts and notes in 2017, her related corrrespondence was reunited into a small collection.
Organization
- New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
- New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Scipio Quarterly Meeting
- New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Orthodox : 1828-1955). Scipio Quarterly Meeting
- New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Orthodox : 1828-1955). Farmington Quarterly Meeting (1828-1955)
Subject
- Publisher
- Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College
- Finding Aid Author
- Susanna Morikawa
- Finding Aid Date
- 2017
- Use Restrictions
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Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce items in this collection beyond the bounds of Fair Use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder or their heirs/assigns. See http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-RUU/1.0/.
Collection Inventory
Letters to Percy Clapp, Keeper of the records, 1953, describe her work on family history and includes her 1946 New Years greeting which featured a transcript of her great-grandmother's letter. In 1966, she corresponded with Levinus Painter who was writing a book on the History of Friends in New York State. She notes that his previous booklets didn't cover the separations and lawsuite involved. A letter to her cousins mentions Painter's project and her desire to have the records of Conservative Friends convenient to her research rather than in New York City where the Yearly Meeting records were being consolidated in the Haviland Records Room.
Scipio Preparative, Collins Meetings