Barbara Heck

BARBARA HICK (Baby) Ruckle was born in 1734, in Ballingrane. She is the daughter of Margaret Embury and Bastian Russell. Bastian Ruckle (Sebastian), and Margaret Embury, daughter of Bastian Ruckle (Republic of Ireland), married Paul Heck (1760) in Ireland. The couple had seven children of which four lived to adulthood.

The person that is the subject of this investigation has either been an important participant in a significant incident or presented a distinctive statement or proposal which has been recorded. Barbara Heck however left no messages or documents, in fact they are not evidence since the date of her marriage has no significance. There is no evidence of original sources that can trace her motivations and her behavior throughout her lifetime. Nevertheless she has become an heroic figure in the early period of Methodism in North America. The biographer has to define the myth, explain it and describe the person who appears in the tale.

A report by the Methodist historian Abel Stevens wrote in 1866. The advancement of Methodism throughout the United States has now indisputably made the modest names of Barbara Heck first on the listing of women's names in the ecclesiastical history of the New World. Her record must chiefly consist of the setting of her precious name from the historical background of the cause whom her name is distinguished more than from the history of her own life. Barbara Heck was involved fortuitously in the inception of Methodism throughout the United States and Canada and her fame stems from the common tendency of a highly successful movement or institution to praise the beginnings of its existence to enhance its perception of the past and the past.