Barbara Heck

BARBARA(Heck) born 1734 in Ballingrane (Republic of Ireland), daughter of Bastian and Margaret Embury. Bastian Ruckle (Sebastian) (Sebastian) and Margaret Embury, daughter of Bastian Ruckle (Republic of Ireland) and married Paul Heck (1760) in Ireland. The couple had seven children of which four survived childhood.

The subject of the biography usually an individual who has had the leading role in important historical events, or who has come up with unique ideas or suggestions that have been captured in written form. Barbara Heck, on the contrary, did not leave notes or written documents. The evidence of such matters as the date of her marriage, is merely secondary. There are no surviving primary sources from which one could reconstruct her motives or her conduct throughout the course of her life. But she's become a hero in the early history of Methodism in North America. It's the job of the biographer to clarify and explain the story for this particular case and to try to portray the person who was part of the story.

It was the Methodist historian Abel Stevens wrote in 1866. Barbara Heck is now unquestionably one of the pioneer women in the historical record of New World ecclesiastical women, as a result of the changes in the field of Methodism. Her record will be largely due to the naming of her deserving name from the historical background of the great cause with whom her name is distinguished more than from the events of her personal life. Barbara Heck was involved fortuitously at the time of the emergence of Methodism in both the United States and Canada and her fame lies in the tendency for the most successful movements or institution to praise its early days to reinforce its belief in history and its history.