Free Church of Scotland Ministers (1843-1900): Obituaries V

This page was last updated on: Apr 15, 2021 @ 4:19 pm

Development

This web-site started out life as a means of supplementing the information that is provided by Ewing’s Annals of the Free Church of Scotland, 1843-1900.

A small gap has been filled in recently in regard to the later life of those Free Church ministers who went into the Union of 1900 and became ministers of the United Free Church. Formerly I gave no details of their ministry thereafter but simply gave a page number in Lamb’s Fasti of the United Free Church (FUFC) where that information could be found. Now I have given the places and dates of ministry of these ministers in the United Free Church with the corresponding reference in the FUFC. This will especially be of use to those who don’t have immediate access to that reference book. As I say, a small gap has been filled.

But the filling of one gap only reveals others. Some Free Church ministers survived to see the Union of 1929 – the Union of the majority of the United Free Church with the Church of Scotland. In regard to their ministries, the gap has now been moved from 1900 to 1929: what happened to them after the Union of 1929? A little work needs to be done to fill in that gap.

Moreover, the original aim was to supply biographical details of all ministers who served in the Free Church between 1843 and 1900. I depended on the Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae (FES) to supply details of the lives of Free Church ministers who had served at any time in the Church of Scotland; and I depended on the FUFC to supply the details of the Free Church ministers who had become minister of the United Free Church. However, it has become apparent that Lamb has not in fact supplied the biographical details of all these men. There are around 300 ministers for whom such details are missing, and efforts will now be made to fill in that gap too, as time permits.