January 30-February 1

On January 30 I continued cataloging the various metadata of the documents. The more progress I made the more difficult this task became. The beginning portion of the documents were organized copies of meeting minutes that gave a pretty clear picture of what was happening in the past. However, the later documents were handwritten notes and their dates were all over the place. I do know that John C. Fuller was the secretary of the Orlando Ministerial Association and was responsible for the authorship of many of the documents. That is why many of his documents were stored and organized so well in the First Unitarian archives. However, John C. Fuller left the First Unitarian Church of Orlando in the summer of 1961 for a new church in New England. It was around this time that the documents became more erratically organized and I don't believe this to be a coincidence. These handwritten notes indicated that not too many important events had happened in 1961 and beyond. Poor attendance and talks of possibly merging with the Orange County Ministerial Association were things that were commonly brought up. Many other documents were just copies of the older ones. One interesting document that fit into neither of these categories was a copy of Sunday Closing Law bill, which made it a law for businesses to close on Sundays and made it so that any business open on a Sunday would receive a misdemeanor. The Orlando Ministerial Association was against this bill because they saw it as a violation of the first amendment. This resistance was discussed at earlier meetings but these discussions would cease to be mentioned in later records. Overall, as time went on it seemed that the Orlando Ministerial Association conducted less activities.

 February 1st proved to be a very productive day. I finally finished the metadata and I scanned the rest of the documents. After I scanned the final documents I cataloged their metadata and finished examining all the documents. The final documents were a mix of handwritten notes and printed letters that dated to 1961-1966. The secretaries during this time were Reverend Brown of the Unitarian Church and a Reverend Proctor from another Christian church, since these two were the secretaries they were most likely the authors of the later documents. Reverend Brown would later become president and he is the member who is last mentioned being president since the final document mentioning him dates to 1966. This is the year where the written records of the Orlando Ministerial Association leave off. The Orlando Ministerial Association did not appear to be up to much during their final years. The mentions of wanting to merge with the Orange County Ministerial Association disappear and the Orlando Ministerial seems to be preoccupied with trying to get WFTV Channel 9 a federal license in 1966. This presents a sort of mystery since the documents do not indicate how the Association dissolved. Based on mentions of poor attendance in previous documents it seems likely that poor attendance and a lack of enthusiasm were the culprits. However, this is not explicitly stated and gives the Orlando Ministerial Association a rather anti-climactic end. No other documents pertaining to the Association appear to exist but there are documents having to do with John C. Fuller that might have some useful information. I plan on scanning those because while the OMA documents did not present a full story, they did leave me with an interest in a man that seemed to be the driving force of the group until his departure in 1961.