READING
ROOM

billy graham center archives
2007 annual report

Ben Torrey and his wife Elizabeth in the Manuscript Reading Room in search of Torrey Family history. They came to the Archives to use the letters and diaries of his great grandfather R.A. Torrey, Sr., evangelist in the late 19th and early-20th centuries.

The Manuscript Reading Room (also serving researchers using materials from the College Archives & Special Collections) is the one place where researchers - 492 of them during 2007 - from Wheaton College, the Chicago area or the four corners of the world use the actual documents housed at the Archives (see the Reading Room statistics; also see the Web site page of the annual report for off-site use of Archives resources).

“As a missionary in training often, it is easy to get into the theories and ideas of "how to be a missionary" but when we can read these journals and see into their lives and what missions was like for them, it brings an element of reality and practicality to what can otherwise be only theory.” The comment of one researcher who was working in the Archives for a graduate school project. Click here to read reports from a dozen different researchers about the projects they worked on in 2007.

       Among the topics researchers explored in the Reading Room during 2007:

See a more extensive list of topics researched in the Reading Room