Elkinton, Waring Family papers

Katharine Wistar Mason Elkinton (1892-1961) was the daughter of Quakers Katharine Evans Stokes Mason and Samuel Mason. She attended Westtown School and took courses at a business college. She married Howard Elkinton in October of 1916. During World War I, she and Howard worked for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in France as relief workers (1917-1919). She taught and worked in the maternity ward of a hospital in Chalons while Howard was posted in Sermaize. Upon their return to the United States, the couple helped to found Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting. In 1923, Katharine Elkinton established, along with business partner Sydney Cole, the Germantown Book Store in the front room of their home. The bookstore closed when both women were expecting babies. A printed postcard for the bookstore showed a Hessian soldier fleeing Philadelphia. In 1938, Katharine and Howard went to Germany; while Howard was director of the AFSC Berlin office, Katharine helped over 1,000 professional Jewish women emigrate to Australia.

Howard West Elkinton (1892-1955), the son of Joseph Elkinton and Sarah West Passmore, was a graduate of Haverford College and worked for the Philadelphia Quartz Company, a family business, until ca. 1930. He married Katharine Mason in October of 1916. They both worked in France during World War I, he in Sermaize doing harvesting work. He went to Germany in 1938 under AFSC auspices, this time as director of their Berlin office. He suffered broken bones in a car accident on his way to Poland. Back in the United States, Howard joined the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation in 1944 to assist Wilbur Thomas in editing the Schurz magazine and the American-German Review, and became the executive director in 1946. He returned to Germany in 1947 and from 1948 to 1949, to investigate projects for the Oberlaender Trust and Foundation where he helped enable the rebuilding of the Goethe house and the establishment of the Free University in West Berlin.

Bernard Waring (1876-1959) founded the firm of Yarnall-Waring Company with D. Robert Yarnall. He was one of the founders of the American Friends Service Committee in 1917 and was on the committee to set up Civilian Public Service camps for conscientious objectors to be run by Quakers.

Thomas Waring (1921-2001), son of Quakers Bernard and Grace Waring, graduated from Wesleyan University in 1948. He spent the summer of 1942 on Wilbur and Mildred Young's share cropper land, and later worked on the Taylor farm, before transferring to a Civilian Public Service camp at Big Flats, New York and later in Coleville, California and Wells, Nevada as a conscientious objector in lieu of military service. He later served as an orderly at the Elmira hospital, a psychiatric institution. He and Theodora Elkinton married in 1946, and in 1947, the pair went to Finland as AFSC relief workers to help rebuild houses. In 1948, Thomas began teaching at the Shady Hill School in Nahant, Massachusetts, then Graland in Denver, Colorado, and back to Massachusetts (to teach and later as headmaster) at the Cambridge Friends School. He was clerk of Wellesley Meeting until 1978. He and Theodora divorced in 1979, and he later married Shirley Norton.

Theodora Elkinton Waring (1927-), daughter of Howard and Katharine Elkinton, attended Germantown Friends School from 1940 to 1944. Prior to that, she attended the Quaker school in Eerde (Netherlands), while her father worked for the AFSC in Germany. She began her involvement with Young Friends Fellowship in 1935 when she was 16; in 1943, she went to a Junior Work Camp at Vinal Haven Island in Maine; she started her association with Young Friends in 1943 as well. She attended Smith College as a religion major, but did not graduate. After her marriage to Thomas Waring in 1946, at Coulter Street Meeting in Philadelphia, they went to do relief work for refugees in Karelia, Finland. Their first child was born in 1949, and four more children followed. Thomas Waring's jobs took them to Massachusetts and Colorado and back to the east coast. She received her bachelor's from Simmons University in 1971, a master's in education from Lesley College in 1973, a master's in divinity from Harvard University, and finally a doctorate from Boston University School of Theology in 1983. This education prepared her to serve as a chaplain at the New England Baptist Hospital and later at the Danbury State Hospital. In 2001, she traveled to Japan to study Inazo Nitobe, who had married her great-aunt Mary Elkinton. Elkinton Waring is author of the book Sacred trust: a Quaker family since 1816, published in 2007.