This archive consists mainly of administrative records that were held by the Amerikan Bord Heyeti (ABH), which was the Turkish office of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), at its headquarters in Istanbul. ABCFM was a Protestant agency founded in the United States in 1810 with the aim of sending missionaries abroad for religious and altruistic work. The first missionaries arrived in Izmir in 1820, and up until 2010, when ABH closed permanently, ABCFM and its successors pursued education, health, and publishing work in Turkey and the surrounding regions.