Mar 20, 2019
By Janet Thorngate, Chairman, SDB Council on History People sleuthing their family history often discover that in the process of building that endless genealogy chart, the quest for illusive details draws them deeper and deeper into an ancestor’s world. Suddenly they are “into history” (though they never “liked history”) and the name on the chart becomes a real...
Feb 20, 2019
Victor Harold Burdick, M.D. (1927-2015) “We are thanking you for the doctor whom you sent to us,” wrote J. Witness Mankhanamba. “It was a strange thing to see how he was doing with the people. He did not care how dirty they were, did not care how poor they were, but he showed his kindness by giving help to these poor people. Oh! God is Almighty, whom we thank....
by Janet Thorngate Part 2 Fifth in a series of spinoff articles from recent research on the Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists1 The Newport Seventh Day Baptist covenant listed no tenets of faith. Once signed by the original seven, its pattern of commitment to a common faith walk and watchcare seemed to hold for generations, but very seldom were...
by Janet Thorngate Part 1 Fifth in a series of spinoff articles from recent research on the Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists1 Their 1671 covenant pointed up the communal nature of a search for guiding principles: “seeking God’s face among ourselves for the Lord to direct us in a right way for us and our children.” It also acknowledged the dynamic...
by Rev. Nicholas J. Kersten Director of Education and History The question of the keeping of holidays and festivals among Seventh Day Baptists is for some a matter of dire importance which points at the purity of our faith. For others, it is seldom given a second thought as they carry out whichever traditions have been handed to them. Given those divergent...
Oct 26, 2018
by Kim Merchant One of the SDB Historical Library’s challenges, faced by many specialized libraries, is how to make our materials available to online researchers. In the olden days, researchers expected to travel to the library, pull out a card catalog drawer and rifle through index cards to search for their subjects. In these modern times, researchers...