One of my favorite photographic subjects recently has been the old Quaker meetinghouses in our area, and in the last few years, I’ve photographed quite a few of them, mostly in Chester County. One of the challenges involved with this pursuit is actually finding where the meetinghouses are located, since, in many cases, they are no longer active. While the active meetings are relatively easy to find, there is often little or no information available readily to help find the inactive meetings. Though I include information on many of my genealogy sites about the old meetings in each area, I an in the process of building a site that will concentrate just on the meetings, particularly the older ones that may not have an active membership any more.
For many years, I’ve wondered how to tell where various folks were buried when the record stated that they were buried at these older, inactive meeetings’ burial grounds. If, for example, they were buried at Brick Meetinghouse, the actual meeting is known as East Nottingham, and either designation may have been used. To make things more confusing, there is also a West Nottingham that was commonly called “Little Brick Meeting”. Neither of these is to be confused with the modern-day Nottingham meeting which is actually located in Oxford, PA, while both East and West Nottingham meetings are in Cecil County, MD. At one point in history, however, that particular part of Cecil county had been part of Pennsylvania. Does your head hurt yet?
