STURBRIDGE, Mass. – Sarah Blanchard was sorry she skipped a worship service. Sarah Wood apologized for denouncing infant baptisms. And as for the Cheneys, Joseph and Abigail? Well, “with shame, humiliation and sorrow,” they acknowledged having had sex before marriage.

More than 250 years ago, their confessions of sin were dutifully logged by the minister of the church here, alongside records of baptisms, marriages and deaths, notes about meetings heated and routine, accounts of finances, texts of sermons and, in some cases, personal accounts of conversion experiences from young adults.

Now, in a regionwide scavenger hunt, a pair of historians is rummaging through New England church basements and attics, file cabinets, safes and even coat closets, searching for these records of early American life.

The historians are racing against inexorable church closings, occasional fires and a more mundane but not uncommon peril: the actual loss of documents, which most often occurs when a church elder dies, and no one can remember the whereabouts of historical papers.

The historians – James Fenimore Cooper Jr., a professor of history at Oklahoma State University, and Margaret Bendroth, the executive director of the Congregational Library in Boston – are trying to persuade small-town church leaders to turn over their records for digitization and preservation.

The record-retrieval effort is painstaking. Every summer, Cooper (no relation to the 19th-century author; his grandparents were just admirers) and Bendroth travel from church to church, trying to persuade ministers and lay leaders to part with treasured documents.

In some cases, churches are excited to do so. But for some of the churches, letting go of documents is difficult.

In Dudley, Massachusetts, where a congregation was established in 1732, Thompson Boyd, a history teacher who volunteers as the church’s historian, showed Cooper a page from a Bible translated into Algonquian by John Eliot, who was seeking to convert the local Nipmuc Indians. The church’s documents had been kept in a narthex cloakroom for years but were recently moved into a locked, fireproof file cabinet.

Boyd said he would have to discuss with his church’s council whether to allow the transfer of the documents to Boston for safekeeping, noting that from time to time, people stop by looking for records of their ancestors, and that they like seeing the original papers.

“I have mixed feelings,” he said. “I still use them. But what if something happens to me?”