HISTORICAL SKETCHES

CANE CREEK BAPTIST CHURCH

Number 9: February 2005 www.canecreek.org 6901 Orange Grove Rd., Hillsborough, NC 27278

TWO THOUSAND NAMES

The History Committee has been working on a list of everyone who has ever been a member of the church. You can take a look at a first draft of our handiwork on the church's web page. Presently, the list contains about 2300 names.

An important reason for providing this list on the Internet is to assist people doing family genealogy. If you type an ancestor's name into a search engine such as GOOGLE, you may discover information that you could find in no other way. Bill Waddell, who looks after our web page, estimates that GOOGLE will discover our listing within a month and make all the names available to those doing searches.

One line is devoted to each person whom we know something about. We give the person's first, middle, and last names, followed by five dates: the year joined, the year born, the year died, the year the person left the church (blank in most cases), and the year excluded (also blank, thankfully, in most cases). We also have a space for comments. Here we note nicknames, names of spouses, names of parents, destinations of those who left the church, and reasons for exclusion (a topic discussed more fully below)

How many people have belonged to Cane Creek Church? As a rough estimate, we have guessed that an average of ten people per year have joined the church. Since we date back to 1789 that would give an estimate of 2160 people. But Cane Creek has spun off several other churches and in the process accepted people from other communities as members. Some of these people made it into our records so that the estimate of 2160 could be low. So a rough estimate would be that between 2000 and 3000 people have belonged to the church.

Where did we get these names? Primarily from two sources. Both come from records kept by the church clerk. (Joe Kenyon is our clerk now.) The clerk keeps a record of business meetings. Up until the 1960s, Cane Creek regularly went into business session once a month. The usual order of business would be to record new members, the granting of letters of dismissal to departing members, the consideration of disciplinary problems, and the appointment of committees. In recent times, we have given up regular meetings and call them on an ad hoc basis as needed.

The other source is the church roll, also kept by the clerk. Every ten or twenty years, the clerk would compile a fresh roll of alphabetized names. As new members joined, the names would be added. As members died, left the community, or were excluded, their names would be scratched out. Over a period of years, this process results in quite a messy list, so the clerk prepares a fresh list and the process begins all over again. We have rolls dated 1829, 1856, 1869, 1877, 1888, 1895, 1916, 1944, and 1964.

In addition, we have combed the minutes for mention of names. Sometimes we have found a name of a person, who, for example, was appointed a delegate to an Association meeting, but whose name does not appear on any roll. We have added all such names to our list. We have also looked at historical sources outside our own church records. George Purefoy was our pastor for 14 years beginning in 1839. His book, History of the Sandy Creek Association, gives the names of several church members. James Mason was our preacher for 11 years beginning in 1871. He kept a diary now located in the Southern Historical Collection in Chapel Hill. Soon we will inspect it for mention of Cane Creek names (which we know are there).

This looks almost like an embarrassment of riches. The bad news is that there are huge gaps in our records. One of our early clerks, Enoch Crutchfield, lost his house to a fire in 1829 and our early records were lost with it. The only names from this era are the original trustees (because their names appear on a deed in Hillsborough) and the few names we can find in Purefoy's history. Many of these names will be on the 1829 roll compiled just after the fire. But missing are the people who joined and then either died or moved away. We have probably lost at least 100 names in this way. There are other gaps in our minutes:1844;1849-1864; 1866-1867;1922-1925;1933-1940; and1961-1963.

Exclusions Most early churches acted as a watchdog over the behavior of members. At monthly meetings, members could report the bad behavior of their neighbors. After the Civil War, the church even appointed a "Spiritual committee" whose sole responsibility was to report on misbehavior. Some offenses, such as murder or 'bringing forth a bastard child" were so serious that they resulted in prompt exclusion. Lesser offenses, such as drunkenness and dancing, were judged proportionally to the accused person's contrition. If he or she admitted guilt and begged forgiveness, the church usually forgave. But anyone who was not contrite (like Emoline Pickard who said that she had danced and would dance again), was excluded. When exclusions occur, the comment field gives the reason stated in the minutes. The language is sometimes quite raw and many offenders bear familiar family names. We hope that everyone will consider this as part of the historical record and not take offense. As Gregg has said "perhaps the exclusions were more an indictment against those doing the excluding. After all, isn't the church supposed to be a hospital for sinners?"

The present list is a first draft. It combines several overlapping church rolls. Some names were on more than one roll so, when we alphabetized the whole list, these duplications wound up next to each other. We haven't yet purged the duplicates. Other duplicates are intentional. For the sake of genealogists doing searches by name, we have many females on the list twice; once with their maiden name and once with their married name

We need your helpThere are many blank spaces in our listing. We know the year of birth of very few of our members, even our current ones. We also know little about the year of death for our ancestors. Right now, the 20th century portion of the roll is being examined by Margaret Miller and Charles Snipes. They are trying to remember first names of female members (many of whom as only known as Mrs. so-and-so), who is married to whom, and who are the parents of whom. This is the kind of information that genealogists crave. So if you can help us fill in some blanks, please email me the information or mention it to me at church. If you do not have an Internet connection, ask to borrow a printed copy of the roll. There is also a copy in the church office which you should feel free to examine and write on.