01/08/2025
I spent several months in 2023 and again in 2024 researching, pro bono, a turn-of-the-19th-century missionary named Charlene "Charley" Warnock from St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta (my church). Her story is one that demonstrates courage, determination and an independent spirit. She forged her own path, experiencing the unexpected adventure of a lifetime, working as a missionary in China and Japan throughout the almost 20-year period of her middle adult years.
I am pleased to share that The Historiographer magazine, published my article on Charley Warnock in its autumn 2024 issue as its front-page story! The magazine is published quarterly by the National Episcopal Historians and Archivists, the History Society of the Episcopal Church, and the Episcopal Women's History Project.
The Story of Charley Warnock
Charley Warnock was born to a life of comfort and privilege in 1863 in Bullock County, Alabama. But sometime in in the late 1890s, she made the extraordinary decision to give that up and become a foreign missionary. At age 36, in the fall of 1899, her dream became reality, when she left Atlanta as a representative of the national Order of the Daughters of the King and St. Luke's Episcopal Church for a long and arduous journey to Shanghai, China. There she would be a missionary teaching girls and young women Bible studies and needlework. She remained in Shanghai until 1903, living through the Boxer Rebellion and contracting malaria. She returned to missionary work in 1908, travelling to Japan, where she would remain, with periodic visits to the U.S., until 1919, when she made her final return to the U.S.
Charley never married, lived all her adult life with her married sister, Lillian Warnock Tucker and her husband, Henry St. George Tucker (who later became the 19th Presiding Bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church), and died in 1941 at age 78.
Without Charley's personal diaries or correspondence, we may never know precisely why Charley became a missionary or what she thought about the Chinese and Japanese people and culture. Yet, clearly, she wanted something different in her life and perhaps to make a difference in others' lives.
Charley had long been forgotten, but my research has re-discovered her significant role as a woman in the Episcopal Church.
