Shrewsbury NJ Quaker Meeting Records 1659

Question

I'm looking for the records of the meetings at about this time, when a Samuel Tilton was expelled (correct term?) from the meeting. Ancestry has them, but I'd like a more accessible site.

Also wondering why the births of Samuel Tilton-1496's children weren't recorded.

Answer 1

You can try accessing Shrewsbury records through the TriCollege Library of which Swarthmore College (which has the Shrewsbury minutes) is a part. Not everything that Ancestry has images of from the collection is available directly online from the library. It sometimes takes a bit of hunting to find things at TriCollege.

I believe the term you are looking for is disowned rather than expelled.

Are you certain the childrens births are not recorded? It's possible the records are lost, have not been transcribed or images have not been taken and indexed. If they were recorded it would be normal for them to appear more than once place such as monthly meeting minutes and often quarterly meeting minutes as well. If he had been disowned before their birth the births would not be found in the minutes unless the mother was still in good standing.

Comments

Thanks. Always want to use the right word.

I've been combing thru Stillwell looking for the birth records, to no avail, and no other Tilton genealogists seem to have found them, either.  The births would have been over a decade before the disowning, but it's not clear that this applied to Samuel Tilton Sr, the father.  It might have been his son Samuel.  The father might even have been dead by that date, as he had made his will the year before. Samuel Sr seems to have been in good standing during the 1740s, but the record of his first marriage isn't there, either.

There's a whole raft of the NJ Tiltons who were Quakers. They should probably have the sticker for that.

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By all means do add the Quaker Sticker to their profiles as well as categorize them by their monthly meeting.

You won't find Quaker records before 1650-ish depending on the location. George Fox didn't found the society before this and he wrote many, many letters exhorting his fellow society members to keep better records (they did not start out scribbling it all down). In the colonies you can read there weren't any Quakers until a few showed in Massachusetts 1656 (I forget the exact year) from England. That's incorrect. There was already a meeting in Salem held in the Nicholas Phelps (my 9th ggf) family home before the official first missionaries arrived from England.

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I should add, before someone points it out, that there are certainly "non-conformist" records of Quaker precursor groups in parts of England that predate the early organization of the Society of Friends.

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corrected date

Answer 2

FYI I found Shrewsbury Quaker Meeting records abstracted and indexed in the book Early Church Records of Monmouth County, New Jersey.  It's in copyright and print only; I added a table of contents to the space page. Births weren't recorded sequentially, but under family groups (so must have been compiled later).

• Quaker Births and Deaths of Shrewsbury Monthly Meeting 1657-1800
• Quaker Marriages of Shrewsbury Monthly Meeting 1674-1800
• Abstracts of Shrewsbury Monthly Meeting Minutes 1733-1756 and 1786-1800

I checked the index for Samuel Tilton and as noted in his biography there are no records for the births of his children.  These Tilton profiles are really well sourced, kudos to Lois!  The only record for a Samuel I didn't see already was a Christ Church at Shrewsbury baptism: "Tilton, Rebecca, d/o Samuel and ___, 2 July, 1749" (page 214).

Comments

Probably Rebecca Tilton-1658

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Shrewsbury Meeting records are also transcribed verbatim in Stillwell's Miscellany, pages 240-374; marriage records include witnesses to weddings.

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Thank you, Heather. Great to know these sources for this.