Full helpers description

Methodist Missionary Society, Council for World Mission (formerly the London Missionary Society), China Inland Mission and 140 other missionary collections

School of Oriental and African Studies

Overview

Very rich contextualising information about missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. If you know you had a relative who was a missionary then this will be a very valuable resource. It is particularly useful as it provides an excellent resource for womens' history.

Detailed usage description

The School of Oriental and African Studies holds a large archive of missionary materials. If you are lucky enough to have a relative who was a missionary this may be a very rich source of information for you. The archives are a great source of information since missionaries were expected to send regular letters and reports on their progress to the mission headquarters and these have survived to a large extent.

These archives are also particularly useful for getting information about your female ancestors: Victorian and Edwardian census data concentrated on collecting data about males as the heads of the household and income earners, and it may not be possible to find out (for example) your female ancestors' maiden names from these sort of records. The missionary archives however contain rich information about young women in their own right, their interests and their motivations for performing missionary work.

Biographical information can be patchy, but some series, for example Candidates Papers, are a mine of information on the social origin and family background of individual missionaries.

How to tell if the collection is useful

If you know that a family member was a missionary, or worked for missionary groups, then clearly this archive is likely to be invaluable. Collection level descriptions are available on AIM25, and on the MUNDUS website, and if you’re lucky your ancestor may be mentioned in these.

If you do not know which organisation an individual worked for, there are a number of publications which may be helpful. For example, if you know the region where your ancestor was a missionary but not the society, try World Missionary Atlas (Edinburgh House Press, 1925). This gives details of the range of missionary societies working at the date of publication, lists the areas in which each society worked and has an index of mission station locations.

You can also email a query to the , giving as much detail as possible. The minimum details you’ll need to supply are:

• a best guess at your ancestors name (bearing in mind that they may be in the archive under their maiden name);
• the missionary organisation they worked for (remember, there were literally hundreds operating during the 19th and early 20th centuries);
• what evidence you have that leads you to believe that your ancestor was involved in a mission; and
• a best guess where and when your ancestor’s mission took place.

Ultimately to find out whether your ancestor is recorded in the missionary archives you need to browse the item level handlists, most of which are unpublished. You can browse these in person in the SOAS library.

If you plan to email the archivist with a query we suggest that you read our tutorial on how to do this most effectively.

Access arrangements

You will need a reader's ticket to use the archives (day passes will not suffice). There are a number of ways you can obtain a reader's ticket, so the archives staff or phone +44 (0)20 7898 4180 for more information. You can also find out more about access to the Library at SOAS at on their web site.

Work to make the archive more widely accessible is underway, and an item level catalogue will be placed online in the future. Information on progress towards getting this online can be found here on the SOAS archive web site.

More Information

More detailed information is available on the SOAS website and the MUNDUS site. SOAS also provide short printed guides which are available on request from the archivist.

The following publications may also be useful for background information about missions (they are available for reference in SOAS):

• Andrew N. Porter. The council for World Mission and its archival legacy. SOAS 1999.
• Bernard Thorogood (ed) Gales of change: responding to a shifting missionary context: the story of the London Missionary Society, 1945 – 1977. Geneva WCC 1994.
• Norman Goodall. A history of the London Missionary Society 1895 – 1945. OUP 1954.
• Richard Lovett. A history of the London Missionary Society 1795 – 1895. OUP 1899.

Example(s) of the holdings

Figure 1: The earliest known portrait of David Livingstone, the most famous of the LMS missionaries. (Clicking on the image shows it at full size.)

Figure 2: William Charles Willoughby, a prominent missionary, with his family, most of whom were born out in Southern Africa where he was stationed for much of his career. (Clicking on the image shows it at full size.)

Two images from the collections showing prominent missionaries. (The images are reproduced by kind permission of the Council for World Mission.)

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