Dear Friends:

In the last few years, several meetings in the north Philadelphia suburbs have confirmed that their graveyards hold the remains of formerly enslaved African Americans. Some of these men, women, and children were likely fleeing slavery along the Underground Railroad and have been forgotten; their journey to Freedom nearly erased from the history of this country.    

We are a small ad hoc committee engaged in a new project since July 2015 to correct this erasure.  The project is called “Honoring Those Known Only To God.”  The primary tasks of our project are:

(1) to honor the long forgotten African Americans--freed and fugitive--who died on their way to Freedom through the Underground Railroad; and
(2) to identify the Quaker burial grounds that hold their remains.

As part of our initial research, we hope to identify individual Friends who may have aided these fugitive African American men, women, and children; identify Quaker meetings that had connections to the Underground Railroad; and identify meetings whose burial grounds may hold the remains of those who were fleeing north to Freedom.  

Would you kindly share any pertinent information with us, using the survey below?   We hope that one tangible result of our project will be a compilation of this information so it can be shared with others who have an interest in this concern.

In gratitude for your help,

The ad hoc committee for Honoring Those Known Only To God
Liz Oppenheimer, clerk

PS. This survey may take 10-30 minutes or longer to complete, depending on your wealth of knowledge and level of interest in this topic. We thank you sincerely for taking the time to fill it out and, possibly, share the link with other Friends.