May 28, 2019
By John R. Morgan
The title comes from an observation I made in an email to Janet Thorngate in which I enclosed a camera-shot of the handwritten note to “Dea. David Rogers” signed “Geo. B. Utter.” It was on the first of two blank pages in a bound volume of the entire first year of The Sabbath Recorder (52 issues! Volume I: June 13, 1844 – June 19, 1845). For how many years it had been on top of this tall closet in the choir loft? It’s fifteen years older than this church building! The deacon of the church had received it as a gift from the man who edited the Recorder for its first twenty-five years.
As any researcher, including the most casual family genealogist, knows, when you connect with a meaningful bit of the past, it is intensely exciting. That bit pops off its page like a static-electricity shock and becomes a super-charged new secret that you’re bursting to share. A transfusion from another’s life seems to shoot into your system and jump-start your resting heart.
Wow! It is transporting in the genuinely marvelous pre-Marvel comics meaning of the word: you feel yourself in the presence of some new brightness, trying to see anything the writer saw, and smell the very surroundings of the moments reported. While thus enthralled, you strain to capture every bit you feel so you can report how the discovery magically collapsed “the walls of time,” as Bill Monroe so soulfully put it.
The Sabbath Recorder has become a new lifeline for me in searching for tidbits about the lives of over 100 of the “residents” of the West Neck Cemetery in Waterford, Connecticut, which became the new Seventh Day Baptist burial ground in 1853, taking over for the smaller Old Rogers Cemetery, which was almost full.
And The Sabbath Recorders that I mean are “the real ones” that were put out the way the original publisher and readers expected! Yes, sir, none of this glossy colored print and staples stuff! And, by gum, always citing the King James! In 1844 that meant each week’s paper was produced on a single broadsheet measuring 30 inches wide and 21-1/2 inches tall; it was printed on both sides, then folded lengthwise to make a four-page paper with five columns per page. Clearly, a 3-foot lapboard, if not a table, was an invaluable reader’s aid.
I am currently finishing a project of finding the sources of old, often eroding epitaphs and have been transported several times by locating obscure, yet freshly poignant poems inscribed to memorialize former neighbors and relatives. But years of occasional research on three residents, all church members, who were lost together off Sandy Hook (NJ) on January 12, 1853, on board the Schooner Thomas W. Williams had come up empty until I was going through some early 1853 Sabbath Recorders and found this in Vol 9, No 38, March 3:
MISSING VESSELS.—The Pilot Boat “Commerce” left New Jersey about the 1st of January, on her regular cruise, and the last that has been seen or heard of her was off Little Egg Harbor during the snow storm of the 12th. She is supposed to have been lost, with all on board, including four pilots, an apprentice, a boat-keeper, and four hands. A fishing vessel belonging to Waterford, Ct., Thomas Beebe captain, was seen about the same time and place, and has not since been heard from. She had on board six or seven persons, of whom three, we believe, were members of the Seventh-day Baptist Church at Waterford. (emphasis added)
Eureka! Thank you, Nick Kersten, for making this time-transportation possible without a plane ticket, or a 2,100 mile road trip, or a delay until I could schedule a trip to the library in Janesville. The Sabbath Recorder is now ALL available at www.sdbhistory.org all 175 years of it!
Looking through original broadsheet weeklies in that timeworn volume at our church has provided fresh wonders that nourish my historical bent, plus affording a rare direct-contact experience for my two boys, 6th and 8th graders. I made sure they got some “handle carefully” contact with documents they will surely read about someday: broadsheet newspapers.
As noted above, the first Sabbath Recorders were printed on both sides of one sheet folded in half to make a four-page newspaper measuring 15 inches x 21-1/2 inches per page. Two headlines from the very first paper, published “New-York, Fifth Day, June 13, 1844” include:
Theophilus Brabourne (1590-1662): This was the first in a series of biographical reviews of those who were important to asserting the observance the Biblical Sabbath on the Seventh-day.
Morse’s Magnetic Telegraph: In exploring applications of this new development, the telegraph, they note that its “perfect success…has excited the astonishment and admiration of the community…[and] put us upon the
inquiry into the future agency of the wonderful contrivance which thus, without metaphor, annihilates both time and space. It has been said that the railroad system has given a perpetuity to our Union, which it would not otherwise possess—and that with iron bonds is our country bound together. But the day of iron bars must now yield to that of copper wires.”
And this is where we see yet another way in which the past never ends. Not only does a 175-year-old newspaper force me to think of how my third great- grandmother, Nancy (Rogers) Brooks (1788-1872), most assuredly paged through this very volume, but at some point her son and grandson did, too. Since it has been kept in the church, it is nearly guaranteed that my grandmother and mother had stray moments with it, and now my sons and I have read at it, making seven generations of unbroken family contact and/or readership of the very first Sabbath Recorder.
Whew!
Even though the seven generations of direct contact brings the past yet again into the present, the Morse article could easily tack on subsequent “wonderful contrivance(s)” that “annihilate both time and space,” such as the copper-wired telephone and trans-Atlantic cables, then the wireless transmission of radio and television signals, eventually enhanced by satellite communications, and ultimately including the many genuine marvels of cell phones, the
Internet, and “the cloud.”
When I wrote to Janet about my discovery of this set of 1844 Sabbath Recorders, I knew in the way historical bush-whackers do that not only does everything we see in the present track back to an origin somewhere, but that indeed, the past never ends.
John R. Morgan is the Secretary/Treasurer/Archivist/ “Their-storian” of the West Neck Cemetery Association in Waterford, Connecticut, a position he’s held since 2004. In 2018 he was baptized by the Reverend Scott Smith in Long Island Sound and became a member of the Waterford SDB Church, the church where his mother was raised and his maternal grandmother was a lifelong member. In this line, he represents an unbroken chain of members going back to three of the seven founders in Newport (Samuel and Tacy Hubbard and the Rev. Wm. Hiscox). His research on cemetery “residents” has relied almost exclusively on the compendious work of Jon Saunders, whose contribution has been invaluable in establishing family links there, as well as following his own Rogers line prior to his third great-grandmother, Nancy (Rogers) Brooks (1788-1872), who is buried in West Neck Cemetery not far from Deacon David Rogers (1786-1859), her same-level second cousin.