Origins & Mission
The Digital Archive was created by necessity. When we set out to help a parish digitize its records, we realized that there was no repository dedicated to caring for Episcopal church records.
We created one.
Calvary Episcopal Church, Dinwiddie, Va
Genesis of The Episcopal Project
Edna Johnston is a historian who grew up in rural Dinwiddie County in the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia where her father was the Rector of Bath Parish that was founded in 1727. The closing of her home church of Calvary, which was founded in 1844, along with a kick from the Almighty, prompted Ms. Johnston to put her skills and resources to work to preserve the records of Calvary and the other churches in the parish. Johnston pulled in her staff at History Matters, the company that she founded in 1999, got the blessing of The Right Rev. Edmond Browning who baptized her, and began deploying the knowledge, advice, and labor of a cadre of gifted librarians, archivists, system engineers, storytellers, church elders, and many, many volunteers.
With the encouragement and prompting of the Rev. (now Canon) Willis O. Foster, Sr., the records of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, a church that was started by formerly enslaved Virginians in 1867 in Petersburg, was added. Johnston, Foster, and their colleagues started to explore how the records of churches, and the stories of Episcopalians in the Diocese of Southern Virginia could be collected, digitized, and made accessible. In 2023, they launched The Episcopal Project with a mission to expand this work to Episcopal churches nationally.
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Petersburg Va
By providing expertise and means for immediate and long-term care of their historical records, individual stories, and sacred spaces, The Episcopal Project seeks to create tools and digital infrastructure that serves The Episcopal Church and its congregations and that protects it from bad actors.
We give special attention to church records and individual stories at the greatest risk of being lost due to the age of our elders, locations in areas of environmental threat or disaster, the displacement of people and records due to church closures, and the consolidation of churches in rural and urban environments. We focus on preserving and protecting records and recording stories that reflect the full history of The Episcopal Church.