Quite a task: a group led by his­to­ri­an Thomas Hamm has dig­i­tized old records of Dart­mouth (Mass.) Meet­ing. Vol­un­teer Andrea Mar­covi­ci gives us a taste of just how involved this process could be:

We strug­gled with ‘s’s that looked like ‘f’s, ‘y’es that actu­al­ly were ‘the’s. Cap­i­tal let­ters were more art than stan­dard writ­ing, and tired clerks that would write the first few let­ters of a name and then throw a lit­tle let­ter in the air and fig­ure we would know the rest.  We kept a run­ning list of all that we saw in order to keep a con­sis­tent practice.

Some of the offens­es Dart­mouth Friends were dis­owned for are list­ed. Some seem quite harm­less„ like the broth­ers who were forced to apol­o­gize in 1746 for allow­ing “fid­dling and danc­ing in their Hous­es.” Oth­er offens­es are shock­ing in their cru­el­ty, like Friend Abi­gail Allen, who beat an enslaved African “so unmer­cy­ful­ly” in 1711 that he sub­se­quent­ly died from the wounds. Dis­own­ment was not a life sen­tence: some­one could repent and be let back in. Incred­i­bly, only three years lat­er Abi­gail con­vinced the meet­ing that she was sor­ry for her manslaughter.