Editing Howell Harris (section)

==The papers of Howell Harris==
Harris kept a detailed diary and carefully filed the letters he sent and received during his ministry. His papers offer a first-hand account of the Welsh Methodist revival. After his death, they were left to gather dust for over a century before [[O. M. Edwards]], in the 1880s, noted their importance and suggested they ought to be cared for. By this time, the former home of Harris at Trefeca had been turned into a college, whose deputy head, Edwin Williams, took on the task of putting the papers in order. They were kept there until 1910, when the [[Presbyterian Church of Wales]], as their ostensible owner, decided to set up a committee to take care of them and study them.

By 1913 the scale of the work needing to be done on the papers became apparent. Many of the papers were in Latin, and it was estimated that it would take much of a decade and a vast sum of money to ready them for publication. In 1913, it was decided it would be a better use of resources to set up a Historical Society of the Presbyterian Church of Wales, which would publish a regular journal that would include some of Harris's papers.

Probably around 1932, the papers were moved from Trefeca to the denomination's theological college in [[Aberystwyth]]. These papers, along with others from [[Coleg y Bala]] (an old college of the denomination in Bala, North Wales), were taken in 1934 to be stored safely at the [[National Library of Wales]]. There the papers remain in the vaults to this day. Revd Dr Geraint Tudur (son of [[R. Tudur Jones]]), formerly Lecturer in Church History at [[University of Wales, Bangor]], and subsequently General Secretary of the Union of Welsh Independents, published a biography: ''Howell Harris: From Conversion to Separation, 1735–1750'' (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000).