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Westbury Quaker Meeting House

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Date: [unknown]
Location: Westbury, Long Island, New Yorkmap
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The first Meetinghouse was built in 1702, second meeting house built in 1801, which burned. The current meeting house replaced it and was built in 1902.

Located at 550 Post Avenue Westbury, NY 11570


WESTBURY M0NTHLY MEETING

Information on this Meeting records below from the Quaker Encyclopedia page 391

Meetings for worship had already been held at Woodledge, now Westbury, and at the Farms, later called Lusum, and still later called Jericho, when the earliest Quaker minute in America was written, in 167l. These meetings still exist. Westbury Monthly Meeting may be considered as old as that of Flushing, but no minutes are extant before 1697. Its vital records were for many years recorded in the parchment bound book in which Isaac Horner, an Oyster Bay man, copied in 1685 the vital data of all Quakers on Long Island, and which was continued in use by Flushing (now New York) Monthly Meeting.

While the Quakers of New York City Meeting were largely in commercial business, those of Westbury were always almost universally agricultural. They and their wives rose "while it is yet dark", and tended their flocks and herds, cleared the land they had purchased by definite deeds from the Indians, paying whatsoever the latter asked. Much land so bought and so cleared is still owned and lived on by descendants.

By 1730 a book for their own vital records was begun, in which numerous earlier data were recorded, a few being definitely noted as copied from Flushing records.

Westbury Monthly Meeting included meetings established approximately in the following order: Oyster Bay; Westbury; Jericho; Matinecock; Cow Neck (now Manhasset), and Bethpage; all of which are still part of the Monthly Meeting except 0yster Bay, which faded out, and Jericho and Bethpage, which were set off as a separate Monthly Meeting. It also had for short periods meetings at Rockaway, Hempstead, Huntington and Secatogue. Secatogue or Sequatague is the old name for Islip, in Suffolk County. A meeting house was mentioned there in 177l.

In the deplorable Separation which occurred in 1828, out of 340 members only 41 including children, were of the Orthodox body. These, with 7 adult and 2 children of Jericho MM called themselves Westbury and Jericho Monthly Meeting, which has ceased to exist. The vital data from their records is herein indicated by the letter 0.

It should be noted that besides the Cock-Cocks-Cox Genealogy, 1914, which I have cited as "Cox Gen." there are other Genealogies of Long Island families, Frost, Seaman, Underhill, Jones, etc. and the Oyster Bay Town Records, 1653-1878, which will add to the data herein given. A comparison of dates in some of these genealogies, especially before 1752, will show numerous differences, owing to the number of a month being transposed to the name of a month, and very generally wrong in the genealogies. Besides these printed genealogies, the extensive and accurate data on 60 Long Island families, gathered from Bibles and other family records by the late George W. Cocks, of Glen Cove, now in my possession, cited herein as "Bibles", will probably in time be preserved in some metropolitan Library.

The term "priest" in the records, means an Evangelical or Episcopalian minister - never a Roman Catholic priest.

The dates from tombstones in Quaker burial grounds at Westbury, Matinecock and Manhasset taken by Frank Haviland and George W. Cocks, 1904, have been herein incorporated. In all our Quaker burial grounds, many non-members were interred. Most of these were related to members.





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