March 12th: Vestry Attendance

St. Matthias’ was officially founded as a mission of St. George’s, Place du Canada, in 1873, which means our community is 150 this year! For the next 12 months, we’ll be diving into the archives to shine the spotlight on particularly interesting parts of our history.

The attendance sheet from Vestry 1930, “one of the largest and most representative ever held in the history of the church” at 53 attendees.

The St. Matthias’ Annual Vestry Meeting is this Sunday! In lieu of a regular blog post, we’ve compiled a list of Vestry Attendance Dos and Don’ts, based on some curiosities from past Vestry minutes and attendance sheets.

DO: attend even if your spouse doesn’t feel up to it. Vestry 1928 was the first time we recorded women present without their husbands!

DON’T: forget to sign the attendance sheet. Between Vestry 1993 and Vestry 1999, the clerk was only able to record approximate attendance numbers.

DO: double-check the numbers. The minutes from Vestry 1929 declare “over fourteen members of the Church were present,” which had to be edited in pen to say “forty” – a significant difference!

DON’T: be discouraged by the number of people who end up attending. We might not get to Vestry 1974’s peak attendance of 104, but we can do better than Vestry 2008’s 20 or Vestry 1926’s 14.

DON’T: rely on someone else to sign the attendance sheet for you. At Vestry 1982, some men forgot to add “and Mrs.” to their signature lines, and at Vestry 1985, the rector AND student assistant forgot themselves! In both cases, Marjorie Morgan, the then-secretary, had to scribble the omissions in on the margins.

DO: use a pen to sign the attendance sheet. Vestry 1942 was the last year for which the attendance sheet has evidence of fountain pen usage, and the pencilled names from later years are beginning to fade!

DO: make your voice heard! Attendance has fluctuated quite a bit over the years, even considering the years where attendance was not recorded, but if you look closely at minutes from each Vestry meeting, as your humble historian has, you’ll see that often only half a dozen people actually speak up. At Vestry, all our voices carry equal weight – and our history bears out that often the least-heard voices have the most important contributions.