For institutions
When an institution becomes the steward of somebody else’s memory.
Churches, guilds, societies, mission agencies and denominational archives. Same discipline, same refusal to invent, four different sets of practical problems.
Churches & parishes
Founding stories, centennial and anniversary histories, pastoral transitions, member memory programmes, and churches that are closing.
Churches → IIWomen’s groups & guilds
Auxiliaries, altar guilds, missionary unions and circles — the half of congregational history that was never minuted.
Women’s groups → IIISmall & rural congregations
The church of sixty on a county road. Less history written down, and far more of it still walking around.
Small congregations → IVSisters, brothers & religious orders
Jubilee accounts, founding histories, oral history programmes and archive assessment for communities whose arithmetic is running out.
Religious orders → VGenealogy & historical societies
Thematic volumes drawing on members’ completed research, and workshops teaching members to write their own findings up.
Genealogy → VIMissions & denominations
Missionary family histories, multi-family thematic work, referred commissions, and assessment of collections already in the archive.
Missions →The same four questions, every time
What an institution needs settled before it commissions anything.
Who owns the result?
You do. Copyright transfers to the commissioning body on final payment. I retain no licence and charge no ongoing fee. Where a family is the subject, the family’s consent governs what may be published — that is written into the proposal, not assumed.
Who reviews it?
You name one person — an archivist, a pastor, a committee chair. They see the full draft and have two rounds of correction. One reviewer works; a committee of nine does not, and I will say so before we start rather than four months in.
What about the difficult parts?
You decide what is included. I decide that nothing included is invented. If leaving something out would make the rest actively misleading, I will tell you, and then it is your call. What I will not do is write institutional apologetics, and I would rather decline the commission than produce it.
What do we get besides the book?
The interview recordings and a clean index of who said what. Written consent from every living person quoted, on file. And a short gap register listing what could not be established, so whoever picks this up in twenty years does not begin from nothing.
Assessment first, usually
Before commissioning anything new, it is often cheaper to find out what you already have. I will read the unfinished manuscript, the cassettes, the three binders nobody has opened, and give you a written assessment of what is usable, what is at risk, and what finishing it would take. Occasionally the answer is that you do not need to commission anything at all, and I will tell you that too.