Document Decoding: Fred Wise and Jeanette Harkema's Church Transfer

In the Protestant world, church transfers are nothing unusual. It was a custom, at least to my maternal grandfather's generation, to marry in the wife's church. That's why my grandparents married in the Methodist Church, despite my grandfather being RCA. When Protestant families moved, they often had to switch congregations. In or around 1923, my great-great grandparents Fred Edwin Wise Sr. and Jeanette Gertrude Harkema moved from Ionia, Michigan to Holland, Michigan. Ionia County is two counties east of Ottawa County (where Holland is), so it made sense for the Wise's to switch congregations. However, when they moved, they also switched denominations!

According to this document, which was found in "U.S., Selected States Dutch Reformed Church Membership Records, 1701-1995", Mr. and Mrs. Fred E. Wise were members in full communion of the First Presbyterian Church in Ionia. They had probably been members for a few years, as the family was living in Ionia in the 1920 Census. The record goes on to state that at their own request, they are dismissed from the congregation and recommended to the "Christian care and fellowship" of the First Reformed Church of Holland. This order was given at Ionia on March 25, 1923. Once the family had moved to Holland, they began attending First Reformed, an RCA congregation where my family has deep roots. This was probably up to at least the time of Fred's death four years later, because when she died in 1951, Jeanette was attending Prospect Park Christian Reformed Church- yet another Protestant denomination!