Evander McGilvary's Translation of Matthew, Luke, John, and Acts into Lao (1895)

For a few short years in the early 1890s, Evander McGilvary (son of pioneer missionary Daniel McGilvary) worked in the Chiang Mai area of what is today northern Thailand.  But at the end of the 19th century, the people of that area were linguistically and culturally Lao and McGilvary's primary ministry task was translating the New Testament into the Lao language. He never completed that task due to his 1894 resignation from ministry which I have written about in "Evander McGilvary in Northern Thailand: An Honest “Heretic” and the “Conservatives” Who Wanted to Keep Him," Journal of Presbyterian History 100, no. 1 (Spring / Summer 2022): 4-19.

When I did the research for that article, I learned that McGilvary hoped to continue working on that translation when he returned to the United States.  However, I never saw evidence of how far he got in his translation.  When looking for images of Evander McGilvary recently, I found that he actually got pubished his Lao translation of Matthew, Luke, John, and Acts.  And it has been digitized!   You can find it at the Hathi Trust via this link and I have also attempted to embed the document below.  Print copies can be found via WorldCat.