New Accession

The SIM International Records: Reflecting on the Accumulation of Years, Consultation … and then Acquisition

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For American Archives Month this October, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections features archivist Paul Ericksen’s behind-the-scenes look at the recent donation of SIM International’s historical records, one of the largest collections the Archives has ever received. Matching the uniqueness of archival material, the donation and accessioning process can present particular challenges, especially for a collection of SIM International’s scale and complexity.

Documents often tell stories of long-ago events. Archivists, on the other hand, usually don’t see the acquisition of a collection that spans most of their career. In 1984 – this really is a forty-year-long archival story – the Billy Graham Center Archives was asked to come to SIM International’s Toronto office to consult with the mission about the future of its in-house archives. Although the mission had already accumulated a substantial collection of archival materials, SIM was looking to the future to ensure that the materials documenting the mission’s history were preserved for its own and researchers’ use.

Paul Ericksen (center) during a second visit to the SIM USA Headquarters and Archives in North Carolina, 1994.
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New Treasures: A Collector’s Gift to the Archives

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The Wheaton Archives & Special Collections and the Marion E. Wade Center are pleased to announce new additions to their archival holdings donated from the estate of Ralph Blair. Dr. Blair collected widely in the areas of American evangelicalism and British Christianity. Earlier this spring, several boxes containing artifacts from the Blair collection arrived at Wheaton College for campus archival staff to add to our rich collections. These items will soon be available for research, and a few highlights from the collections are featured below. We are grateful for these donations! 

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“Nothing new but that which hath been before”: 2025 Accession Review

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With the start of a new year comes a favorite tradition at Wheaton Archives & Special Collections – taking a moment to look back at some of the fascinating “new” old materials that found their way to the Archives over the last year. Below is a review of selected highlights from the Archives’ 2025 acquisitions:

Evangelism & Missions Archives

Overhead showing the relationship of foreign missions to local ministry for the Brazil field of Unevangelized Field Missions. (Crossworld)

Perhaps the most significant additions to the Evangelism & Missions Archives were the large accessions we received from evangelical foreign mission associations. SEND International (formerly Far Eastern Gospel Crusade), Crossworld (formerly Unevangelized Field Mission), The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM), and SIM International are each multimillion dollar organizations that between them have thousands of workers on five continents. SIM, in particular, was born out of the merger of several different missions active in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe. Together these mission organizations gave more than 100 linear feet of their files to the Archives (TEAM has been donating materials since 2022) with other large accessions from SIM expected in 2026. In addition, the family of John Gration, a missionary of Africa Inland Mission and long-time professor of missions at Wheaton College, gave his files on the history of AIM, including the manuscript of his dissertation. Together these different accessions give an extraordinarily detailed pictures of North American Protestant missions around the world in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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The Zamzam Sails Again

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On March 19, 2025, the Evangelism Missions Archives received a wonderful item for its Zamzam collection (Collection 624): A 58-page typescript with handwritten notes of a diary kept by one of the ship’s passengers, along with a photo.

Photo included with the transcript. The back reads, “Released internees (Shipwrecked), S. S. Zam zam [sic], S. S. Port Brisbane.” The only man in the picture, in the back row, is Dr. Dudley Wright. Perhaps the older woman, sitting down slightly to his left, is Ethel Wright. The Port of Brisbane was torpedoed near Australia in November 1940.

The Zamzam was an Egyptian vessel which had been chartered in early 1941 to take passengers to Africa, including over 100 missionaries. Travel was dangerous, of course, because war had broken out between Germany, Great Britain, and France and was being waged on land and sea. As a civilian vessel under a neutral flag, it should have been exempt from attack. However, the German commerce raider Atlantis mistook it for a troop transport and started shelling the ship on April 17, 1941. The captain of the Zamzam used a flashlight to frantically signal the German ship that the Zamzam was a noncombatant vessel with women and children aboard and the German stopped the attack, but the damage was done. The Zamzam was sunk. However, all the passengers and crew were pulled out of the sea by the Germans. They were transferred to a German supply ship and taken to Nazi-occupied Europe. America was not yet in the war, so American citizens were repatriated back home. But all British citizens, as well as members of the British Empire such as Canadians, were sent to German internment camps where many stayed until the end of the war in 1945. For about one day, the sinking of the Zamzam was big news in American and British newspapers, until it was known that all passengers and crew had been plucked from the waters.

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New Old Stuff in the Archives: 2024 Edition

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As we celebrate the start of a new year, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections looks back at some of the interesting accessions of historical documents that the Archives received in 2024 and the new or updated collections we processed and opened to researchers.

New Accessions

For almost seventy years, the story of missionaries’ attempts to bring Christianity to the Waorani people of the Amazon (called the Aucas by their enemies) has been well known to American evangelicals. This year we received the files of Dr. Kathryn Long, who wrote God in the Rainforest (2017), which tells the story from the killing of the five missionaries who first made the attempt to reach the Waorani in 1956 through the development of an Indigenous Christian community among the Waorani in later years. She generously gave her voluminous research files and relevant books to the Archives, including material from her own trips to Ecuador and documents about her work on the staff of Campus Crusade in South America in the 1980s.

Boat used for Unevangelized Fields Mission (later CrossWorld) for river ministry in Brazil.
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Introducing the Samuel Escobar Papers

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Dr. Samuel Escobar, undated. From Accession 2024-0023, Box 6.

The Wheaton Archives & Special Collections is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of a significant research collection documenting the life and ministry of Peruvian missiologist and theologian Dr. Samuel Escobar. Spanning more than five decades of Dr. Escobar’s life and ministry, the papers are a valuable addition to the Evangelism & Missions Archives and will significantly expand our collections representing the Global South, especially voices from Latin America.

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Looking Back on A Year of New Old Stuff

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Song sheet (ca. 1928) for evangelist Betty Weakland, one of the most well-known of the so-called “girl evangelists,” popular in the first decades of the 20th century. Donated by long-time friend of the Archives, Robert Dresser. Accession 2022-053.

“Collection” and “Accession” are words used all the time in the archival profession. In Wheaton Archives & Specials Collections, an accession is material received from a single donor, usually an individual or an organization. It might be a single folder or hundred of boxes, with only a general inventory to use as a finding aid.  A collection is a set of materials (perhaps including paper-based records, photographs, audio or video recordings, etc.) that has been fully arranged and described. Most of our collections have been formed from several accessions. Here in the Archives & Special Collections, both collections and accessions are open for research (unless there have been donor-requested restrictions) but the lack of a complete finding aid and access points can make accessions difficult to locate or use for research.

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Ring in the New, Accession the Old: 2021 Edition

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As circulation and movement slowly returned, life approached closer to normal in Wheaton Archives & Special Collections, as elsewhere, in 2021.

The first accession of 2021: 21-01 the papers of David Howard, described below.

Most of the staff worked from the office for almost the entire year and with proper precautions researchers could once more be seen reading in the Reading Room. Normalcy (to borrow President Harding’s term from just over a century ago) could be seen in other areas too. In 2020, the Archives acquired 16 accessions, totaling a little more than 9 cubic feet. In 2021 there were 45 accessions, totaling 119 cubic feet. 

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Ring in the New, Accession the Old: 2020 Edition

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In grim 2020, the staff of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center Archives had much to be thankful for in our miniscule corner of the world. Our staff remained healthy and productive. Although on-site access to the collections for researchers was either completely or mostly restricted for the year after March, we were not only able to acquire, but to make a significant amount of material available online. It was indeed the best of times, the worst of times.

Map of the 1939 World’s Fair from the new material added to Collection 278 The papers of Elisabeth Elliot in 2020. Written on the back, “Pop took me in Sept. [1940]”

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