Edwin Warriner was born on January 19, 1839, in Ellisburg, NY. He was born into a religious family; his father, Solomon J. Warriner, was a farmer and local Methodist preacher. By the time he was fifteen, Warriner was teaching public school and had obtained a license to be a Methodist preacher. He went on to study theology at the Biblical Institute of Concord, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1861. Warriner then began his career in the ministry in South Meriden, Connecticut. At the beginning of the Civil War, a regiment of soldiers was garrisoned there and he began to minister to them. Warriner was appointed as chaplain to the regiment and traveled with them for three years during the war. Afterwards, he settled in Brooklyn as a Methodist minister.

By 1880, Warriner was Secretary of the New York East Conference Historical Society. His two published books, The Old Sands Street Methodist Episcopal Church of Brooklyn, NY, published in 1885, and The Warriner Family of New England Origin, a history of his family from 1628 to 1898, show his passion for both history and genealogy. Warriner died in 1898, shortly after finishing the Warriner Family manuscript, which was published a year later. Warriner's purpose in collecting the documents forming most of this collection was to write an encyclopedia of Methodism on Long Island. He died before producing a written manuscript based on his research. The bulk of the letters in this collection, in which Warriner asks for information about a certain church or reverend, dates from the 1870s-1890s, indicating that he had been collecting information about Methodism on Long Island for the last 30 years of his life.