From Transylvania: Winding Up in Kolozsvar

Just Four Days Remaining in the Archives

I can't believe how quickly my time volunteering in the Archives has gone. With a big Easter break and some days in Budapest, I want to finish as much cataloguing as I can of the English and American correspondence with the Hungarian Unitarian Bishop from 1823-1921. I'll be lucky if I get it half done!
Today I was reading American letters from first American Unitarian President Samuel Eliot and organizers of international conferences. As WWI loomed, the conferences stopped and Hungary suffered under battle with America's homeland untouched. In a letter soon after the war ended, Samuel Eliot told the Bishop of the American Unitarian's plan to match American congregations with Transylvanian churches decimated by war (now in Romania, not Hungary). This became the Partner Church program, then called sister churches.

In the earliest days, around 1870's, wealthy American Unitarians were sending money to the Unitarian Seminary via Bishop Ferencz Joseph in Kolozsvar to help support professors. They were well intended and often the money came erratically with the vagaries of international money exchange and political realities.