Archivist's Sacred Mission

Although she was wearing dress pants, Margaret Jerrido called herself "a jeans kind of girl."

In her line of work, she said, it's not unusual to be on all fours, digging through old shoe boxes and piles of documents.

"I'm crawling through ceilings and basements, but that's where the good stuff is," she said.

Jerrido, 67, has been the part-time archivist for Philadelphia's Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church since 2008, when the Rev. Mark Tyler, the pastor, asked her to help organize the archives room.

Jerrido said the Mother Bethel property, at South Sixth and Lombard Streets, was purchased by Bishop Richard Allen in 1791. It is the oldest piece of land in Philadelphia continuously owned by African Americans, she said. In 1794, the church was officially dedicated, making it the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the world, Jerrido said.

As membership grew over the years, three new churches were constructed over the original site to increase capacity. Tyler said Mother Bethel now has 700 members and is a staple in African American history.

"You can really trace the events from the modern civil rights movements back to the church," he said.

Before arriving at Mother Bethel, Jerrido was an archivist at the former Medical College of Pennsylvania and then head of the Urban Archives in the Temple University Libraries for 17 years. She said her first contact with the church was in the 1990s, when she was asked to look at the archived materials and give her recommendation on preservation and cataloging.

Once she retired from Temple in 2007, she came to Mother Bethel to help expand and enhance the archives. Her mission, she said, is to collect information about all of the A.M.E. bishops as well as Mother Bethel's 52 pastors. However, her passion for collecting historical documents had the church's archives room bursting at the seams.

The small area in the church basement was filled to capacity, Jerrido said, with no room for new material.

"You couldn't move around in here at all before," she said. "All the shelves were literally filled; we were just filled to the gills."

So on Jan. 8, Jerrido and other members of the church moved boxes of what she called "secondary sources" out of the basement and down the street to the Presbyterian Historical Society on Lombard Street. These materials included newspaper articles about events at the church, books on African American history, publications about the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and some of the newer Bibles.

During the move, Jerrido asked that one group of items remain in the archives room: the funeral programs dating back to the 1940s. She said she has grown to love collecting the programs due to their rarity and considers them primary sources for the wealth of information they provide.

"People always think I'm some morbid person because I'm always, like, 'Do you have any funeral programs?' " she said of the collection, which now numbers about 350. "But they get it; they know I like to collect them."

Tyler and Jerrido said that in addition to expansion, they have great plans for the archives at Mother Bethel. Jerrido said she would like to increase her outreach efforts to the students and faculty at the local schools and universities to encourage them to visit the archives for research and field trips.

One goal they share, however, is to one day make their archives one of the premier archives for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with the goal of having the denomination's churches think of Mother Bethel when deciding where to donate their materials.

As of now, Jerrido and Tyler said, there is no one repository that collects all of the materials.

Tyler said that having the A.M.E. archives at Mother Bethel would be "a natural fit" due to its central location between the National Archives in Washington and the National Archives at New York City.

As a researcher, "you can get a lot done with one Amtrak ticket," he said.

Now that she has a few shelves free and the floor is cleared out, Jerrido can continue her hunt for more funeral programs as well as what she said the church is lacking and what really makes a good archive - original documents. She said the archives contain mostly photographs, manuscripts, letters, and bishops' sermons and resumes. However, many of the documents are photocopies or scans from the Internet

One of the most impressive original documents in the archives, Jerrido said, is a minute and trial book from 1822 to 1831, which is the official record of trials held by Mother Bethel for members who had been accused of breaking the church's moral laws.

In order to get her hands on more original items, Jerrido said, she is reaching out to relatives of A.M.E. bishops and pastors who may still have materials related to the church.

Tyler said he commends Jerrido on her work because the information she is looking for is hard to find. He said the original materials about the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Mother Bethel could be scattered about the country.

"People are holding history. I mean literally - it's in their closets at home," Tyler said.