Support Overview

You can support the Moravian Archives by making a financial donation, volunteering your time, or by entrusting your collections to the care of the Archives. The Friends of the Archives support our annual budget. There are also several funds that support specific areas of our work.

Friends of the Archives

The gifts of the Friends of the Archives support the general mission of the Moravian Archives. Donations from the Friends of the Archives make up 20% of our annual budget.

Your donation enables us to preserve, organize, and digitize our holdings, to provide research assistance and to host lectures, exhibits, tours, workshops, and classes. Your donation is an investment in history. Thanks to your support we are the primary resource center for Moravian history in North America.

Planned Giving

You may want to consider to include the Moravian Archives in your will. Your gift will ensure the Moravian Archives will continue its mission to preserve and share Moravian history into the future. We are happy to discuss the various options with you.

The following short videos may help answer some of your questions:

Digitization Fund

The digitization fund supports our efforts to digitize our holdings. In 2018 we began to digitize its holdings. Digital content is uploaded to our online finding aid. Through digitization we are able to make our holdings accessible to a world-wide audience.

Restoration Fund

The Restoration Fund provides funding to preserve fragile items in our collections: maps, books, manuscripts, paintings, etc. In 2023 we were able to preserve a newly-discovered Nativity painting by Moravian painter John Valentine Haidt.

Education Fund

The newly-established Education Fund of the Moravian Archives provides funding for our educational programs, such as school programs, internships, and give support to participants of our courses and workshops.

 

Hamilton Book Fund

The Hamilton Book Fund provides funding to purchase books for the library of the Moravian Archives. The library of the Moravian Archives began in 1751 as the Gemeinbibliothek or Congregational Library, one of the oldest communal libraries in the country. We collect any publication relating to the Moravian Church worldwide. Over the years the Hamilton Fund has made it possible to purchase hundreds of books. Rt. Rev. Kenneth Hamilton (1893-1975) was archivist at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem from 1958 until 1963.

Vernon Nelson Memorial Fund

The Rev. Vernon H. Nelson Fund provides grants to researchers as a contribution toward their travel and accommodation expenses while conducting scholarly research at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA. The fund was established in June of 2011 by the family of late archivist, Rev. Vernon H. Nelson (1933-2010), who served as archivist of the Moravian Church, Northern Province, for more than forty years. This fund is a wonderful way to honor his memory and to promote scholarly research on Moravian topics.

Donate Records

The Moravian Archives collects a wide variety of records, books, and artifacts relating to the Moravian Church.

Before shipping any material to us, please contact us so we can discuss the donation process with you. We usually do not accept materials on deposit or on loan.

We will ask you to sign a deed of gift to transfer ownership of the materials to the Moravian Archives.

Volunteering
Internships
Submitting Church Records