Hi everyone -

I don't know if anyone here has dealt with this issue. My religious
leadership is having difficulty determining which name they want to use for
the repository title and for collection titles. They don't want to simply
go by what was done before, so they've asked for my advice.

We have a repository archive (storage room) for our whole congregation.
Inside are three record collections, each from a different religious
community in our congregation. All of these religious communities merged
into one congregation several years ago.

The canonical and corporate name of my religious congregation and its
religious communities changed many times from the 1860's until now. Besides
name changes in corporate filings and canonical decrees, sometimes the name
changed informally when the majority of members began referring to it by
that name. Often my religious congregation and the religious communities
would have a different canonical name than the corporate filing.

I am lay staff with no legal background, so I only have the rules of
provenance and *Describing Archives, a Content Standard  *(DACS) to refer
to. I am anxious to establish my religious congregation's legal ownership
of the repository and its collections. *Does anyone know if the U.S. legal
system would recognize a canonical decree as a legal name? * Please let me
know what you think of the following:

   - I would base the title of the repository on the most recent corporate
   filing name of my religious congregation, because that is the "parent body"
   that owns it all. So "Congregation Archive of *the Sisters of St
   Francis".*
   - I would base the title of each collection on the the most recent
   corporate filing name of the creator (the religious community) before the
   merger into one congregation. Again, it is because I concerned about
   establishing a chain of custody from the individual community to the merger
   with the congregation (the corporate name of each community is included in
   the corporate filling for the merger event). DACs says I can also choose
   from the name that the creator is generally known as, or the corporate name
   under which the the bulk of the material was created.* Which do you all
   recommend?*

Thank you!

Charlene Martin
Sisters of St Francis/Syracuse

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