Quaker Meeting Notes

Most Quaker meeting notes in the United States are archived at a small number of major Friends (Quaker) historical libraries, primarily located at Quaker-founded colleges. These institutions serve as the official depositories for monthly, quarterly, and yearly meeting minutes.

Primary U.S. repositories for Quaker meeting records

The major archival centers are:

• Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College (PA) — one of the largest official depositories, holding over 3,700 linear feet of original Quaker archives, including minutes, membership books, and microfilm from meetings across North America.
• Quaker & Special Collections, Haverford College (PA) — shares responsibility with Swarthmore for Philadelphia-area and many U.S. meeting records; some meetings have their records split between the two institutions.
• Earlham College Friends Collection & College Archives (IN) — repository for Indiana Yearly Meeting records and other Midwestern Quaker materials.
• Hege Friends Historical Library, Guilford College (NC) — repository for North Carolina Yearly Meeting records.

These four institutions collectively hold the majority of surviving U.S. Quaker meeting minutes from the 17th through early 20th centuries.

Additional access points

• Hinshaw Index to Selected Quaker Records — housed at Swarthmore; a massive card index of extracted meeting minutes from 300+ meetings across the U.S.
• HathiTrust Digital Library — contains digitized Quaker meeting documents, especially older printed abstracts and yearly meeting publications.

Online access

Many of these records have been digitized and indexed through:Ancestry’s “U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681–1935” — which draws directly from Swarthmore, Haverford, Earlham, and Guilford archives.