⊆ Moving Around ⊇
Here we give a description of what each item in the Main Menu on the top bar does.
Ewing’s Annals
We are starting with “Ewing’s Annals” – the third item from the left on the menu bar. When you click on this item, you will have five options:
- Documents: In volume 1 of his Annals, Ewing gave a brief account of the Free Church’s origin and history together with some basic documents connected with the Disruption. He also gave a list of unordained missionaries, Moderators of General Assembly, Clerks of Committees etc. Clicking Documents will take you to that material.
- List of Congregations: Ewing’s Volume 2 provided a brief account of the origin and progress of Free Church congregations. Clicking List of Congregations will take you to that material.
- List of Ministers: In Volume 1, Ewing also provided a list of Professors with a brief account of their lives and, separately, a similar list of other ministers. Here these two lists are merged into one alphabetical sequence. It is here too that the supplementary information which we have gathered is provided. Clicking List of Ministers will take you to all that material.
- Supplementary Information: This is an explanation about the Supplementary information supplied alongside Ewing’s informaton in the List of Ministers. It explains the limits of the research conducted, the sources used, the way in which the information is laid out, etc. It is strongly recommended that anyone intending to use the Supplementary Information should first read this section. Clicking Supplementary Information will take you to this material.
- Obituaries: Obituaries of Free Church Ministers, drawn from the Free Church Monthly publication, are available by clicking this item. Alternatively, you can look for a minister via the Ministers’ List, and you will then find a link to his Obituary if there is one.
Brown’s Annals
Thomas Brown’s Annals of the Disruption tells the story, from a Free Church perspective, of the formation and development of the Free Church. Although written in 1892, it contains a good number of reminiscences of those involved in the Disruption itself. Clicking Brown’s Annals will take you to a short explanation of how this book is being presented here, together with a list of Contents, which will enable you to get to the text of Brown’s Annals itself.
Disruption Worthies
This is a book containing short biographies of people prominent in the movement that culminated in the Disruption. Clicking Disruption Worthies will bring you to an Index listing some items of introductory material followed by a complete alphabetical list of those whose biographies it contains.
Clicking Disruption Worthies / Image Gallery will take you to the portraits originally printed in Disruption Worthies.
Trees
Some ministers had so many other ministers related to them that it became unwieldy to mention all their ministerial connections in the Supplementary Information. The intention is to prepare outline trees of those who have multiple ministerial connections. In the Supplementary Information there will be a simple reference to the appropriate tree, and researchers can see a man’s ministerial connections for themselves. Clicking Trees will bring you to an index of the family trees that have already been prepared. There are 39 trees there – some quite limited; others extensive.
General Index
Researchers who look for Free Church ministers, often look for ministers of the Church of Scotland and of other Scottish Presbyterian Churches. But it can be a problem to find someone in the seven volumes of the standard reference work for the Church of Scotland: Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae (FES) and to collate that information with other sources. Here is a digital General Index with over 23,000 names of Scottish Presbyterian ministers, including those in the FES, the Fasti of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland; the Annals of the Original Secession Church by David Scott; and the two volume work of Dr Robert Small, History of the Congregations of the United Presbyterian Church 1733-1900. Clicking General Index on the menu bar, you can read an account of this General Index. To get to the General Index itself you can go to the Menu: General Index/ General Index or you can click here. You can search FES by Presbytery or by congregation. To do that go to the Menu: General Index/ Searching by Presbytery or Searching by Congregation.
OS Churches
Besides the Secession Churches dealt with in the reference works, by Robert Small and David Scott, there were other congregations which claimed to be faithful to the original testimony of the Secession Church. Clicking OS Churches brings you to a page which describes these churches and gives access to the material that we have compiled on them and their ministers.
Blog
The first post – Why a Blog?
– explains the purpose of creating a blog page. No detailed explanation is needed of what a blog means! Comments are allowed there. Clicking Blog will take you to the blog page.
Articles
Under this heading, we enclose one-off articles that do not fit readily into any other category or that are too lengthy to be fitted in appropriately elsewhere. At the moment there are five articles, closely related to each other, but we hope that with the passage of time, we may add material that brings greater diversity to this section.
These articles will all bear on Scottish Presbyterian Church History.
Contact
This is not designed as an inter-active site nor as a public discussion forum. However we are not averse to:
- dealing with questions on relevant “ecclegen” matters;
- being given notice of typos or links which don’t function or factual errors in the supplementary information;
- receiving well documented additional information which might help towards the completion of this task.
Clicking Contact enables you to send me an e-mail.
It also brings you to a page where the main relevant links to other web-sites are brought together for convenience in one place. So we have a link to the Free Church of Scotland; to sites genealogical and bibliographical; and to technical sites used in setting up this web-site.
Navigation Hints
The menus on the top bar enable you to get from one main item to another at all times. Within each main item, there are indexes and links, designed to facilitate easy navigation. Links are indicated by a change in colour of the type face and clicking them takes you to what they are linked to: Thus, clicking this will take you to the top of this page: Return to top of page
When these link you to other pages in this web-site, or with other web-sites, the new page is opened up instead of the one you have been working on. To get back to your previous page, use the left arrow at the top left of your screen. To get the link to open as well as the page you are on, right click it and open the link using a new tab.
If you are looking for a particular Free Church minister, look for him using the Ewing’s Annals / List of Ministers Menu. Once you find him in that way, there will be a link to the Obituaries, the Trees or the Disruption Worthies, if his name appears in any of these.