IV · Missions & denominations
Institutions keep records. They rarely keep accounts.
Missionary family histories, thematic multi-family work, referred commissions, and honest assessment of the collections already sitting in your archive.
“and their works do follow them.”Revelation 14:13
A denominational archive is usually in decent shape on paper and very poor shape on people. There are minutes, financials, appointment records, prayer letters by the crate. What is almost never there is a readable account of what a particular family actually did, what it cost them, and what the children thought about it.
Missionary family histories
This is a distinct genre and it is harder than it looks. The prayer letters are a primary source and a deeply unreliable one — they were written to be read aloud in a supporting church, and they leave out illness, money, marriage strain and doubt as a matter of policy. Adult children usually remember a different decade than the one in the letters.
The work is to hold both: the record as it was written at the time, and the account the family gives now, side by side, without deciding which one wins. Missionary kids in particular tend to be badly served by the sanitised version, and they are frequently the ones commissioning it.
Thematic multi-family work
A field, a decade, a station, a school. Six or eight families interviewed around one subject and written as a single volume, so that the pattern is visible in a way no individual account shows it.
Referred commissions
Denominations, mission agencies and church bodies refer families to me and step out of the way. The family commissions the work directly, holds the copyright, and decides what is published. The institution can request an archival copy as a condition of referral, and most do.
Assessment of what you hold
Before commissioning anything new: I read what is already in the archive — the unfinished manuscript, the oral history cassettes from 1991, the two hundred pages a retired minister wrote and never placed — and give you a written assessment of what is usable, what is at risk, and what it would take to finish. This is often the cheapest useful thing an institution can buy, and occasionally the answer is that you do not need to commission anything at all.
Boundaries
This is writing, not archival science. I do not do conservation, cataloguing, digitisation or records management, and I will refer you on for all four. I also do not write institutional apologetics: if the record contains something difficult, the work either says so or I do not take it.
Where to start
Send me 250 words about one person.
No fee, no obligation. I will shape what you send into a finished passage, return it, and tell you honestly what your material could become. If the answer is that you do not need me, I will say that too.