Puzzling A Puzzle

If you are going to research historic Christian Universalist Churches of Ohio, you need also to love puzzles. Because that exactly what such research is, maybe even worse: The puzzle pieces are not all in the same box. A few might have been damaged. And there is a very good chance that one or more – often many – of the pieces will be missing. Still, you put together the puzzle as best you can and hope that maybe, just maybe, you will have a mostly complete puzzle that will show the overall picture, even if a few pieces are missing.

The puzzle pieces are found, if they are found at all, often in the oddest of places—The floor and the wall of an old store (Peru) or in an obscure history that appears online thanks to an unknown person (Alder Chapel). Sometimes the pieces are in dusty archives. Hopefully, those archives are indexed and online. And sometimes they are staring us in the face—A repurposed building, a cemetery, and if we are really fortunate, in a Christian Universalist church that has continued after the Unitarian Universalist merger (1961) either as a UU church, another non-credal denomination, or perhaps as an independent. Unfortunately, this last sort of puzzle pieces rarely is.

The challenge awaits! Time to start puzzling.

Frank
March 28, 2026
Sheffield Lake