Guidance needed on when to add Society of Friends (Quaker) Monthly Meetings

Question

Please see the Research Notes regarding this profile for some participation points at Monthly Meetings in England (not sure from the text described below if  Mid Somerset Monthly Meeting, Somerset is the correct name of the meeting or if a different category/MM documentation needs created. Additionally, there are two points of participation in Philadelphia meetings for which it is unclear that one assigned category is correctly named, and the earlier Oxford Township MM may have been too small. For example, what is the cutoff for documenting with a category/MM page? a certain number of participants? the existence of minutes? or any other criteria?...

The presently located secondary source (short title: The Hallowell-Paul Family History. Mary Paul Hallowell Hough. Henry Ferris, Publisher), outlines which descendants participated where (for example, son Joseph Paul participated in perhaps Oxford Township and Abington (which appears to differ from Category: Abington Monthly Meeting, Jenkintown, Pennsylvania (wikitree.com), though Jenkintown was nine miles from Philadelphia - really unclear to me, a novice in the study of these), and his first wife, but not his second wife, who was Presbyterian; and the 3rd generation had some children who remained Society of Friends...

I am still working through the documentation from Hough.

Answer 1

Porter, Michael Cayley will respond to the question regarding the English monthly meeting. 

For correct names of American monthly meetings, your best source is QuakerMeetings.com and I have pointed that link to the search form. 

In American meeting records, what you will want to look for is a minute establishing their affiliation with a particular meeting (this can take the form of acceptance, transfer or even just a preponderance of family records). And, keep in mind that some records including marriages, births and deaths may be found in the records of more than one meeting as these were reported 'up the chain' to Quarterly and sometimes Yearly meetings and may be recorded in other monthly meetings where other parts of a family were members. 

All of that said, you are looking in a place and time in Pennsylvania and environs where many records are not yet digitized or indexed. These records are usually held by Swarthmore/Haverford TriCollege Library. The meeting listing at QuakerMeetings will give you the location of the records but not all of the links have been updated. 

Lastly, there are some errors in American monthly meeting locations caused by a 2019 bot deployment that made errant corrections. Quakers Project is correcting these as they are found so please let us know if you find something that doesn't seem right. The name of a Quaker meeting does not always mean that was/is the location of the meeting (the bot seemed to think it did).

Edit: apologies but I forgot one of your questions. There is no size requirement for a monthly meeting. If the meeting is documented it is appropriate that it have a category created if there is a profile to place in it. One benefit of QuakerMeetings.com records is it will tell you any predecessor and successor meeting names.

Answer 2

Thanks for asking.

The correct English Quaker Monthly Meetings are South Somerset, evidenced by children's birth records, and East Devon, evidenced by the marriage. Cullompton was a local preparative meeting, not a Monthly Meeting. (Ilminster did not become part of mid Somerset Monthly Meeting until 1783, when South Somerset Monthly Meeting was subsumed into Mid Somerset Monthly Meeting.)

I have corrected birth dates for children Ann and Joseph. Quaker dates of this period mostly refer to months as "fifth month", "seventh month" etc, and the Quaker first month in this period was March. They are frequently misinterpreted in transcripts on the main websites, but as citations I have added transcripts which get the dating right. The ones from FindMyPast have accompanying images of the actual records.

I have made the necessary changes, and also corrected the birth dates on the profiles of children Ann and Joseph.

If you are ever in doubt about how to interpret a Quaker date, do ask a question in G2G. But, if you are likely to be looking into other Quaker records, you may find this free space page helpful: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Quaker_Notes

By the way, it is best to give the names of months in dates in biographies (either spelt out or abbreviated - fully spelt out is better as it helps some of those whose first language is not English). This avoids ambiguity: the American way of giving dates - eg 7.5.1776 for 5 July - is different from most other countries (in which that date would be read as 7 May).