Over 160 years of materials from the liberal religious churches in Champaign and Urbana are now organized, recorded, and safely stored in the archives room in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign.

In August 2024, University of Illinois School of Information Sciences graduate student, Haley Shepherd, (pictured below) began a semester-long practicum at UUCUC inventorying and creating a Finding Aid for all the materials stored in the small room off the library. In addition to documents, Haley also organized audio and visual material, posters, blueprints, wooden signs, and pieces of stained glass left over from the reconstruction of the Rose Window. 

Phase 2 of the archiving project will begin in the Fall 2025, when another Information Sciences grad student will spend a semester digitizing the materials. At the completion of that practicum, UUCUC will have a searchable database of all the records that have been kept since the founding  of the Universalist Church in 1859. Many documents from the Unitarian Church and its successor, the Channing-Murray Foundation, are also in our collection. The annals of these congregations will now be accessible to scholars of church and local history and other interested parties. 

For more information on searching the records, please contact Margaret Lovell.