Wayne Kempton, archivist and historiographer of the Diocese of New York, has digitized a run of twenty-two year books for the New York Training School for Deaconesses (NYTSD), formerly located on the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights. The NYTSD, founded in 1891 by Mary Twing (1845-1901) and William Reed Huntington (1838-1909), was a major center for women’s formation in ministry until it closed in 1948. NYTSD year books contain a wealth of information about the school: the names and positions of faculty, admission procedures, curricula, calendars and daily schedules, lists of students and graduates, and appendices with liturgical forms.
The collection, spanning from 1894 to 1927, is available online free of charge through Project Canterbury at the following URL: http://anglicanhistory.org/women/nytsd/ . Anyone with information about the whereabouts of missing volumes for 1919, 1921, 1923, 1924 and 1926 may contact the diocesan archives at archives@dioceseny.org or 212-316-7419.
This collection supplements the earlier work of the Episcopal Women’s History Project in digitizing the NYTSD alumnae bulletins from 1913 to 1967 (available online at http://www.ewhp.org/resources/nytsd/ ).
NEHA life member Richard J. Mammana is archivist of the Living Church Foundation and a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.
—From The Historiographer, Vol. 58, No. 2, Spring, 2018, p. 10.
Richard Mammana 