Also, see the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem to view Moravian Church materials from other parts of the Caribbean region.
Archiving Antigua: A Digital Record of Pre- and Post-Emancipation Antigua, 1760-1948
Genres of resources from the Moravian Church in Antigua, now digitally available as a result of the Archiving Antigua project, include:
- Membership catalogs, including “speaking books,” which contained a concise record of pre-Communion conversations with each church member, with references to exclusions or absences from worship services.
- Baptismal registers and marriage records.
- Exclusions registers, containing records of allegations of so-called “infractions” for which members of various congregations in Antigua were excluded from partaking in worship services. These sources help reveal ways in which Euro-American missionaries characterized the actions, or alleged actions, of church members during the colonial period, and ways in which members responded to reprimand.
- School records, including student registers and report cards from Moravian educational institutions in Antigua.
- Landscape views.
- Maps and surveys.
- Diaries, kept by pastors and missionaries.
- Photographs.
All materials featured are from the holdings of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem.
The Archiving Antigua project was supported by a Digitizing Hidden Special Collections & Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Digitization was carried out by the Conservation for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, between 2017 and 2019. Additional materials have since been digitized by the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, 2019-present, in a continued effort to improve access to materials from Antigua.