Church Record Sunday - Ohio Quaker Records

Up until yesterday, every church record I've found on my Creeden family has been Roman Catholic. I was trying to find an obituary for John Creedan when he popped up in in an Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy by William Hinshaw. The entry below is from Volume 5, Ohio Monthly Meetings in the section for the Dover meetings held in Clinton County, Ohio. The Dover meetings were started in 1824.

According to the list of abbreviations in the volume, "recrq" is "received by request" and "dis" is "disowned" or "disowned, for". In this case, it looks like John and his family were disowned for disunity. Of course, I wondered what that meant!

The encyclopedia is an extraction of the meeting minutes, so if any details were recorded, they would be in the original records. Disunity could be as simple as speaking out strongly against the consensus of the members, although there would have to be a number of occurrences for this to cause a member to be disowned. A possibility is that John supported a cause or group that was contrary to the consensus of the members. The Quaker Corner on Rootsweb is the repository for the Quaker Roots mailing list where I found some discussions on disunity.

The other interesting thing in the minutes is the William Creeden that was received on the same day as John. I've been looking for some evidence that John's brother Patrick William went by William since their father was a Patrick. While I can't tell for sure that this William is John's brother, it looks like a good possibility. The combination of the names John, Minerva, and Hiram is unusual enough to make me pretty sure that this is the same family.

This was the only entry I found for the Creedans in the Quaker records. John is buried in St. Mary's Cemetery in Ft. Recovery, Mercer County, Ohio. This is a Catholic cemetery, so it looks like he returned to his original religion at some point.