If you follow this blog –and you should– then you know that Amherst College has a lot of collections from missionary families. Because I work with these collections a lot, especially in arranging and describing new ones, I’ve settled into a comfortable theory about how the work of missionaries changed over the decades and generations. I notice a first generation of “strict missionaries” whose goal is first and foremost to spread the gospel. Their children, often born and raised abroad, speak two or three languages, and they know their parents’ work and where it succeeded and where it failed. They’re still usually missionaries working for the American Board, but their work often branches into teaching at primary and middle-school levels, or working in a medical clinic. A third generation is even more removed from the original mission work and its members become professors or doctors. Fourth and fifth generations might see some diplomats, government professionals, and journalists. The shift feels linear. But I always knew this way of thinking was a broad generalization, and too comfortable. I knew there would be someone to rock the boat, to mess with my theory — to zig where so many seemed to zag.
Mary-Averett Seelye, ca. 1965
The Consecrated Eminence 