At a fall 2024 meeting of EWGS, Lori Lee Sauber taught us the basics of “Finding Friends in Early American Quaker (Records).”  Explaining we first should understand Quaker beliefs, she cited the website www.Quaker.org from which the following quote comes: 

What Do Quakers Believe? There are two fundamental aspects to Quaker faith. First, Friends believe that all people are capable of directly experiencing the divine nature of the universe—which is known by many names, God or the Holy Spirit or simply Spirit being among the most common. You don’t need a priest or any other kind of spiritual intercessor; you don’t need to perform any kind of ritual. When you need to hear from God, you will. When Spirit has a message for you to share, you should share it.
That leads us to the second key principle, our belief in continued revelation. In the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, we read many stories of God communicating directly with people. Friends believe God’s revelations have never stopped, and that God might reach out to any one of us at any time. When Quakers come together to meet for silent worship, we participate in a shared space in which we strive to become better able, and help each other become better able, to recognize such divine messages.

The best resource for doing Quaker genealogy is the 15 volumes of Encyclopedia of Early American Quaker Genealogy, 1607-1953. All are digitized and available online. Each volume points to a specific group of “meetings” (congregations) in various states. She told us that FamilySearch and Ancestry offer these digitized books. 

Her handout also listed many books with the topic of Quaker records, history and research. Today, 1 Nov 2024, I Googled “Books on Quaker records history” and had a dozen good hits. Another good resource is the FamilySearch WIKI: Quaker. 

If you have Quaker ancestry, you have hit the jackpot for there is a plethora of teaching aids and resources right at your finger tips.