>> Michele Sellars: Good afternoon everyone. I think we're ready to start the program. I'd like to welcome you to the Library of Congress. My name is Michele Sellars. I serve as the head of the local history and genealogy section of researcher and reference services division here at the Library of Congress. We are excited that you've joined us for this informative presentation about finding family history in U.S. church and synagogue records. As you may be aware, the Library of Congress is the largest research library in the world, and contains vast amounts of materials you can access for researching and writing your own family history. There's a common misperception that all of the materials that you need to do this kind of research can be found and searched online. Today's exhibit and lecture demonstrate that old-fashioned library and archival research can reveal details and provide clues that are only available in print. While today's exhibit draws material slowly from the Library of Congress general collections, every part of the Library of Congress collections has materials that you can use for family history research. We hope you'll continue to visit the Library of Congress and access all of our collections to learn about your ancestors and the world they inhabited. So, whether you're just starting out on your genealogy journey, or you've been at it for years, we wish you happy hunting. Thank you. >> Sheree Budge: Hello. I'm Sheree Budge. I'm a reference librarian in local history and genealogy. I'd like to introduce our speaker today. I have to put on my glasses. Sunny Morton is a popular lecturer for the global genealogy community. She's a contributing editor for Family Tree magazine and the author of hundreds of articles and blog posts as well as the brand-new book, How to Find your Family History in U.S. Church Records, which is available there, which she co-authored with Harold Henderson. She is an official family search blogger and a past contributing editor to Lisa Louise Cook's Genealogy Gems podcast. Sunny. >> Sunny Jane Morton: Thank you for the warm welcome and for being here today to learn about finding your family history in U.S. church records. Much of what I teach you today will come from my book, How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records. So, thank you for the opportunity to speak about my favorite topic. It is a topic very close to my heart. So, when we look at our ancestor's lives through historical records, historical records give us lots of different lenses through which we might view them. We might view them through their social lives, through what appeared in the newspaper or a court case. We might view them through the lens of their occupation or their roles in their family or their community, lots of different kinds of lenses or roles or ways of looking at our ancestors' lives. And one way of looking at your ancestors' lives is that here in the United States tends to be quite overlooked is in the records of the churches with which they affiliated. Whether they were an every week sort of devote, or whether they just showed up for the special occasions or whether they just married or were buried in a church or a synagogue facility, then those records were produced, no matter how involved they were in the community, and often, the more they were involved in their religious community, the more you can learn about them through the lens of historical church records. First, let's talk for just a minute about what kinds of religions are we talking about here in the United States. We have a wonderful diversity of religions in our traditions, or in our history, and if you look sort of on the birth of our nation, in 1775, a study showed that the colonists, the British colonists specifically, were about a third Congregationalist, another quarter Anglican or Church of England, just over 20 percent Presbyterian. We have a nice little healthy minority of Dutch reforms, and then the remainder sort of fell into this mish-mash category of Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, and Jews. Less than 100 years later, and I'm comparing congregations, number of congregations versus number of colonists, that's the unit of measure I could find, so less than 100 years later, things have changed dramatically. Now, the nation is half Methodist and another quarter Baptist. And then you see a Catholic, and then the bottom 15 percent, you have the Congregationalists, the Episcopalians, who are the continuation of the Anglican church here in this country, Lutherans, and others. So, what you're seeing is almost a complete flip-flop in less than 100 years. So, you've got a lot of religious turmoil, a lot of diversity, a lot of change going on here. Two main reasons for that, the first is cultural. We've gone from having our established churches, which were sponsored by our governments, the Congregationalist church in the north and the Anglican church in the south in the British colonies. We've gone from that to what we tend to think of as our more democratic faiths, and the choice of choosing your own faith and the faiths that had a democratic spirit to them, sort of a have your own personal experience with God rather than work through a minister or that kind of thing who has authority that sense of democracy was really appealing in our young nation, and that's one reason you see a lot of people, once they have the choice, to choose their religions, were choosing some with democratic spirits. Another thing to look at is the influence of the immigrant groups at the time, and in the 1770s, you've got a lot of Scots Irish heritage. So, you've got a lot of traditions there, and you've got a lot of English congregants as well, the English heritage. So, the immigrant heritage is what you really see accounting for the Presbyterians in 1775, and then in 1860, it also accounts for the Catholics, because you have a growing number, German Catholics, Irish Catholics had started coming in large numbers, were yet to see, Italians, Poles, many other Eastern European Catholics coming as well. And so, the immigrant groups at any particular given time period influence the shape of our national religious pie chart, if you will, over the succeeding generations. So, I'm going to address a few questions today. First, where did your family fit into this diverse and changing picture, and how can you even find out. Second, what might church records say about your family and their experiences? Third, where can you find the records, and you'll see me be a little bit biased today toward the Library of Congress. I'm going to share some of their collections. And then the fourth, right at the end today, I'm going to share a couple of tips with you, a couple strategies, and a couple of my favorite stories that I've come across in old church records. So, where did your family fit into all of this. As I was describing, the religious history, just in the two minute version of the religious history of this country, I bet you might have been wondering how your family fit into all of this, and there are ways to find out. And the first and easiest way sometimes to find out what the religious background is in your family, if you don't know, is to ask them. Living memory only goes so far into history, but sometimes it reaches deeper than you think, and sometimes it reaches deep enough to remember a church that would have been important in your family tradition that you didn't know about. So, ask questions. Did the family go to a specific church? Was anybody married in one or buried in a church cemetery. Did anyone ever join a different church? Any black sheep in the family religiously? If the family was mostly one thing, did someone become something else? What about anything like Sunday schools, charitable societies, any kinds of immigrant aid organizations? Those kinds of things, asking questions like that might job a memory that would serve for somebody that may not, if you said what church did they go to, well they never went to church. Well maybe they didn't go to church, but they could have affiliated with one. Their names could be on the records or roles of one. So, it take you a few different iterations of the question to ask about church affiliation in your family. But you may be able to learn some things. The next place to look, and this is also low-hanging fruit for anyone who has started their genealogical research, is look in the documents you already have. Sometimes they mention a church affiliations, a specific church, or they might just mention a denomination, such as Methodist, without telling you which church it was, but all kinds of records might have used church affiliation or a church baptismal record, in order to prove a claim. Like for military benefits. You might see them listed in newspaper announcements, marriage records, any kinds of family papers that you might have might give you clues about where somebody would have affiliated religiously. It might also be on a tombstone. Sometimes you might find religious iconography or sayings on a tombstone that would point you toward that person's faith background. So, here's few examples. Here on the left is a relative of mine, whose obituary, this was a printed version, it said she had been an untiring worker in the Methodist Episcopal church, ME standing for Methodist Episcopal church, for over 30 years. So, right there, I got a clue. And here's one for another family that I have researched. Osby Johnson or Oglesby Johnson, his obituary mentioned that the services were held at the New Hope Baptist church in Hartwell, Georgia. So, I was able to go right to that church. This is a certificate of marriage from the State of Colorado, and as such, it's not necessarily that interested in the religious affiliation of the people involved, but it does happen to say here at the very top, the person who married them, it says, I, Godfrey Raeber, a Catholic priest, that's on the civil marriage record. Now, that civil marriage record didn't tell me very much more. What you see is what you get. It didn't tell me much more, and you're going to see in a minute how I was able to track down Godfrey Raeber and his records to learn more about this particular couple. But you can pull, sometimes, a denominational affiliation from the name of the minister. So, you can also consider the odds. If you're coming up dry from all these strategies so far, you might think about their ethnicity. If they had a strong ethnic identity, then chances were good, for some ethnic groups, that they may have been affiliated more with one particular church than another. So, this is the list that appears in my book, but you can get a good sense of it here, is that there were ethnicities, immigrant groups, who brought their religious heritage with them, and other groups, immigrant groups, such as African Americans, who when allowed the freedom to do so, may have affiliated more, chosen to have affiliated more with one church rather than another. So, you can also consider the odds if your family were early pioneers or settlers of a particular part of the country. Because those were often part of particular migratory or ethnic groups as well, and so you can see that there are particular churches, and the same is still true now, if you travel throughout this country, you will see regional themes in the popularity of certain brands of religion. Some are more popular than others in certain parts of the country, and that's the basis of the historical record of who settled them. So, local histories, if you found a county history or some other kind of local history that mentions your family or that gives the stories of local churches, as this one does, this mention in a local history of the Mount Vernon Cumberland Presbyterian Church mentioned several of the early members. Among them, some of my relatives, the Weedins. So, I was able to pull from a secular county history information about their church affiliation. Local maps can sometimes give you like well where could they have gone to church. In the days before automobiles and freeways and quick transportation. Sometimes you just had to chose what was local. And so here in this neighborhood when I was looking for Osby Johnson's family, you can see over here on this map, as I was looking for Osby Johnson's family, in the two areas that are circled, and I can't queue them very well here, but the two ones that are circled, I was able to see from the map key, I could see that the designation of a church was a circle with a cross above it. And so, I was able to locate two churches on the map. One is the Harmony Church, that has the letter P after it, and I'm not sure quite what that means, if that's Presbyterian or what that means, but then down below I see written sideways, New Hope, New Hope Ch, New Hope Church, and then underneath, it says COL, telling me from this time and place that this is a historical black Baptist Church. And I already knew that from Osby Johnson's family that he was African American, and so I was able to find the location of this church and do a little more research confirming that it was right there in their neighborhood. So, sometimes people would just go to whatever church was nearest. So, if you already know something about your family's background, ethnic background, or the way they think or the groups that they tend to associate with culturally, you might be able to predict if you found this map of their neighborhood and you saw that there was a Sixth Presbyterian church, which might have been largely Scots-Irish, and you saw the Saint Ann's German Lutheran Church down there at the bottom, and then in the middle there, you saw the Fifth Baptist Church. You might be able to guess where your family would have affiliated. This is from a Sanborn Fire Insurance map, and there's a great, Library of Congress has a fantastic collection of digitized Sanborn Insurance maps. So, you might also be able to find what churches were in town just from the local directories, and this is before there were telephones and after. So, city directories, phone directories often had listings of churches. So, you can go down the list of churches and look for something that sort of resonates with what you know of your family's story or look for ones that are located near their neighborhood if there's no map. So, what kinds of things, I told you now, you know, how you can figure out where they went to church, but what kinds of things might you discover in church records. I do have to confess that not every church record survives. A lot of them don't. A lot them are not easy to find. This is not generally your first line of attack as a genealogist when you're looking for your family history. You're going to go to those censuses and vital records first, for good reason, but when you start hitting brick walls, when you start wanting to know more about the quality or the daily life, the quality of their lives or the daily aspects of their lives, their stories, you want to really get into their biographies, that's where you turn to church records. One reason that I love church records is not just what's said but who it's said about. Church records in the U.S. are more historically democratic than a lot of our other records. They include more women. They include more children, more immigrants, more ethnic minorities, the poor, and sometimes the enslaved, who do not historically appear and are underrepresented in many of our other records. So, while it may be a little bit more work to find an ancestor's church record, it may be one of the very few places you could get insight into that person's life or find their name written. So, what kinds of records? I'm going to highlight both these record types today, or the format, the format of records that you would see. Often, our churches produce their original records in manuscript form. And original manuscripts are often found in archives. A lot of times, those records though have been put into print form. They've been transcribed and published so that others can have access to them. In addition, you're going to find other print records such as church histories or directories, things that I'm going to show you. So, sometimes those print records are going to be unique also, and sometimes those print records are going to point back to what's in those manuscript records that may no longer exist, that may be inaccessible, or that may at least not be easy for you to get to. So, I'm just going to give you a few of the kinds of things that you're going to find in church records, you're going to find information about births. And these show up in the infant baptismal records, but they are also mentioning the child's birth. You're going to find information about marriages. Here on the left, it's for a Louisiana marriage that was transcribed from the 1700s, and the image, what I love about this one is they put a copy of the original image in there as well, so you can look at that too. And then what you see here on the right is a Quaker marriage record. That's a two-page record. That's one marriage. It's a record stating the names of both the bride and the groom, their parents' names and whether they're still living, where they are, the whole description of the wedding vow, and a list there of all who witnessed the wedding. That's all those names who are there, many of which, many of whom were probably relatives. So, if you have Quaker ancestry or somebody who married in the Quaker church, you could really come upon a treasure. Death records appear often, meaning the record of a death and/or burial. Some churches kept one or the other or may have mentioned both, and depending on whether they had burial rights or whether they had their own cemetery. So, you might find different kinds of information about deaths. Here I'm showing you a membership record in manuscript form, one that was transcribed from cemetery records at the top, and then on the bottom there, that little white one that's inset, is death days, and that's a record from a Jewish yearbook from the early 1900s. So, lots of different kinds of ways that deaths might have been recorded in the records of churches. Something I really love about church records and something that a lot of people don't realize is that many times they will be maybe the one place you will find that ancestral home town overseas for your immigrant ancestors. I was interested to find a study on German church records that said that nearly three-quarters of the time you could find that ancestral home town in the German church records they studied. Compared to much lower rates for many of the other common places that people look for the birth places of their overseas ancestors. And the example that I'm showing here is a transcribed birth certificate that came, or a baptismal certificate that came from a little Catholic parish for the child born of immigrant parents. And the record that they sent me showed the birthplace of the child in a little town in Slovakia in the late 1800s and the child's baptism just a day or two later in northeast Pennsylvania. They did not FedEx the baby, so clearly something was wrong here, that was probably not the child's birthplace, and what I was really hoping is that it was the immigrant parents' birthplace. It turns out that was true, and additional correspondence with the parish office, they looked it up for me again, and they said, oh, yes, that's where both parents were born. And so that was something that I wasn't aware at the time could have been in those Catholic baptismal registers, was the parents' birthplace for immigrant families many times. So, there is more, it's not just Catholic records, baptismal records that might tell you about migrations of a family. This is a membership register for a congregational church, and what you'll see, what you see on the left there are the names of the people who joined the church, and then this first page on the left-hand page is all about their admittance information, when they were admitted to the church, how they were admitted, so had they converted to the faith, they were joining it, so it would be by examination in this faith. So, they would have been examined by people with a position of authority in the congregation and admitted, and you see that anyone who was admitted by examination, it said where they were from, the world. They were coming out of the world into their spiritual home, coming out of Babylon. So, you see the sort of religions mind view of when they converted to this faith, that's where they came from. That's also a migration clue. It meant that they lived there. They were locals who united with that church. As opposed to those who joined by letters, that was a transfer process, where you brought a letter of recommendation from your previous church of the same faith. So, you would present a letter from your previous church saying this is where I come from. I'm a member in good standing. So, you can write me into your rolls without me having to go through the process again of joining the denomination. And here, it says whence. The last column on that left page says whence, where they came from. So, Edinburg, Evanston, Illinois, toward the bottom, Michigan. So, you see people coming from different places. That's migration information, and you have an approximate date of migration. Maybe it took them a little while to get around to coming to the church, but you have a period of possible migration. The process repeats itself when they move out. The next page it says, removed. How they were removed from the church. And that doesn't necessarily mean they were expelled from the church. It means they moved, they died, they were gone, they were no longer on the church membership rolls. And so, again, you see columns for when, how they were removed by letter, meaning they transferred out. And then where, where they went. Rootstown, Oberlin, Huron Dakota. So, you see the migration information again, along with that very last column, it mostly says married to or wife of. So, you get some marriage information for that particular person. These membership registers would be most common in some of our Protestant churches. So, you might also get membership information and local addresses, especially within the last, you know, 100, 125 years or so. Here is an example from a Jewish yearbook, an annual, that lists the directory of the members, and that's the kind of thing you might find from many churches in the 20th Century, maybe even the late 19th Century, but mostly the 20th Century. Maybe where they lived, an address, or just that they were affiliated with the church. You find the directory sometimes with the picture. So, here's an example of a Catholic baptismal record, and you can see if you look at the translation that's given underneath, you can see what it says. It says that this is signed by the person who performed the baptism, I, the undersigned, baptized this person, born on this date, of the father, from the place, and the mother, from the place. So, ex loco would mean what place they were from. In this particular record, they did not fill in the birth place of the parents, but you can see that there is a place for it. And it says there that they were married, that little phrase toward the end, and the godparents' names. And then in the right-hand column there, there is a place in a Catholic baptismal record, there is a place for later rights received by that person to be recorded. Later rights received in the Catholic faith, you're supposed to send them back to the parish of baptism. You're always asked for your parish of baptism. The information goes back there. It isn't always recorded, but in this case, it was. It stated later that the person married a person named Michael Zeller, and it gives the date and the name of the church and were it was. So, this infant baptismal record is also a record of an event later in life. Sometimes you'll find records of entire family groups showing together. So, what you see here from the top is clearly a typed transcription of a particular church record from an Evangelical Lutheran church record in New York, and it shows the names of the parents, and it lists all of the children born to those parents. That was so nice of them to just put them all together like that so we could just easily copy it. So, if this is your family, this is going to be a real treasure for you to find. And the one on the bottom too, if this is your family, this would make me cry to find. As I look at the different names for this Bennett family, all the children with their birthdates listed in that second column, and then all baptized here, it says Bennett and Hetty Burton, and then underneath it says Burton and Hetty Burton, and it's possible that that's just a mistranscription, but what I'm interpreting this is, these are the children of an African American couple who was enslaved. What do you see over on the right? All colored servants of Robert and Elizabeth Burton in Long Neck. And so this was in Delaware. This was the 1850s, and so you're seeing an entire family group with paternity acknowledged. It gave me the shivers when I saw that because it's so rare to find and very precious. So, you see what I mean about sometimes church records will show you things that other records of the time period will not. Here's one I just had to put in. It's not in the U.S. It's in England, but it's my own family, and it shows the whole family group. So, this is a baptismal registry for my paternal ancestor, who immigrated to the United States after joining the Latter Day Saint church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And his mother and all of, almost all of the children appear all together along with a couple of the sisters-in-likewise of his older siblings who had also joined with the faith at the same time. And this one felt really special to find, to see all of those McClelland names together and to see it doesn't show their family relationships to each other, but I was able to kind of put they together and could confirm that this was one family group all doing this together. So, another thing that you might find, and so, this kind of gets into the things that might, rather than genealogical facts of significance, these are more the story-based kinds of things. You might find out your family was a donor or a subscriber at their local church and the financial sacrifices or commitments that they made to further the work of that church or their charitable societies or whatever it is that they were subscribing to. So, there are lots of interesting donation lists that you might find either in published records or in the manuscript records. You might find some wonderful images, and if you look back at the exhibit that's here, you'll find lots of books back there with some great images from different church histories, local histories. Often, churches published little histories of their faith on a jubilee sort of an anniversary. So, you might get a 50-year anniversary, just even a booklet or maybe a 100-year anniversary, a little book that they just printed themselves or self-published, and these little books, when you can find them, are just a real treasure, and they often do contain a lot of pictures. Other pictures you might find, I found these on the Library of Congress website. I was looking for information about the First Church of Christ Scientist. I had an ancestor who was Christian Science practitioner in Pueblo, Colorado, and the church is no longer in business so to speak, but there is a photo of it that's digitized form the Library of Congress website, and I was able to see the building itself and to see what happened to it. It became the Impossible Players Community Theater. So, it still had, the building still has a life, just doing something a little difficult. And then, I was also looking for a relative who had affiliated, based on his, this little obituary that I show here in the newspaper, it says that his funeral masses were being given at Sacred Heart in Pueblo, Colorado. Again, on the Library of Congress website, I found a great picture of that beautiful church. Another kind of image you might find would be something more unusual, but I think it's worth sharing because it's so neat, is you used to be able to rent your pews or buy your pews at certain churches, and that's how you'd always get to sit in the same spot. Sometimes it was a status thing. Sometimes it was just a tradition thing. Well, this is just where I want to sit, so you'd know you had a guaranteed seat every time you came to worship. And so there are sometimes lists of pew rentals, and occasionally I was really lucky to find this one that was actually a map of who subscribed to which pew for this particular year. So, you'd know even where they sat when they went to church. >> Do you know date that's from? >> Sunny Jane Morton: I think late 1800s, if I remember right. So, the question was what date that was from, and I think it was late 1800s. I think that practice largely died away by about then, but there are some churches that it was still the practice then, especially if it was a good fundraiser, why not, right? So, local history. You can often learn a lot about what was going on in the community or the neighborhoods of a particular ancestor, especially if they had a strong community involvement or especially if it was the church that was part of a migrant or ethnic group. You can learn a lot about what was going on by the history of the church, because they're going to talk about things that might not appear in the local or county histories. I love, there's a book back there that's here at the Library of Congress that I love, this history of the St. Charles Borromeo Church in Harlem. Yes, that Harlem, New York, which would have started its history Dutch and Dutch Reform, and it's talking, but the history that's coming through the present is that of a largely African American Catholic Parish. And so, it tells the story of how that transition happened. First of all, it had to come out of the Dutch Reformed history and into the Catholic tradition, and then the Irish Catholic, gradually the neighborhood changed, and so the people living there were African American, and those who were involved in this church made a great outreach effort to reach the African American community, and you see it. It's talked about, and you see it in the pictures and in the stories that are told there. So, to me, that's a wonderful lens through which I could better understand what was going on in that neighborhood. Biographies are a common thing to find, especially if your, and probably only if your relative was pretty actively involved in the church, and especially if they were in the ministry of some kind. A lot of churches published annuals, conference reports, annual directories, annual reports of some kind that would give ministerial biographies or tributes for those who had passed away and often also for their spouses, since this was a male-dominated profession, until recent decades. You would also find them for the women, when the women, the wives of the ministers or clergy passed away, you'd also find some nice biographies of them, or women who were otherwise really active in the churches. So, that's a great place to learn things. They're going to be, definitely they're going to come from a strong religious point of view and talk about their religious lives, but that can be very interesting. So, this is, I have a relative who was in the ministry in the United Brethren Church in Pennsylvania, and I was able to find through his annual conference proceedings, and there's a lot of annual conference proceedings here in the Library of Congress, I was able to find an 1869 J. Felix, who shows up there, he's the last name mentioned, he was direct, he was examined by a committee to receive his license to preach. And it says they rendered satisfaction on the doctrines on which they were examined, and they were given a license to preach. In 1870, I see the next year. So, the committee on the first year's course of readings presented the following report. So, they actually entered into this education period, sort of a trial period and a preparation period, before they were fully ordained, and so I can follow it through these records here. And so it says that when they were examined it says they rendered tolerable satisfaction but had not read everything they were supposed to. And so, they could not classify and define the doctrines in regular order, but at least my John Felix, Brother Felix, it says, produced an essay. So, these two did pass, and so they got to move onto the next year. The next year, I just have a transcript from that one, it says that they were carefully examined, and it says what Woodward did and then Felix and Lee both sustained the doctrines of the church well from the word of God. We recommend that they pass to the third year's course, with the understanding that they be required to obtain and study the books that they have not yet read. So, there's still some progress you can see. They've done some things, but they're still kind of trailing in everything that they should. But then you get this in 1872. Early on during the course of this multiday conference, it says that John Felix was examined and was recommended to be recognized as an elder. So, that he receive ordination. And at the very concluding part of that conference, that multiday conference, the Bishop gave his sermon, and at the very end of that, and you see that marked in red here, at the close of this discourse, Reverends R.S. Woodward and J. Felix were solemnly set apart to the office of elders by the imposition of hands. So, this same conference proceeding that gave me insight into his years of preparation to be a minister, also then went on for several years. I know what committees he was on. I know which charges he filled, what churches he was assigned to. I know when he retired and then came back out of retirement and then went back into it. So, I can trace his career in the ministry by looking through these conference proceedings. So, now that I've told you all the wonderful things that might be in the them, you might be wondering where will I find these glorious records. So, of course, the first thing I do with anything these days, and this doesn't sound scholarly at all, does it? Google it. Because if you know the name of a church, if you know the name of a book, if you know the name of anything that you're looking for, but especially the name of a specific church, google the name of the church and its location. You might be directed to that church's current website, if it still exists. You might be directed to its records at a repository. You might be directed to a webpage and its memory. There are lots of different things that, lots of different ways that Google can direct you. It can direct you toward printed records, and you've got the Library of Congress catalog that you can also search for printed records, in WorldCat, the Family Search Catalog, which is specifically organized for genealogists by place and record type. You can go right to a particular place, right to a record type, and then see what church records exist. Certainly, if they have any published things, you might then flip back over here to the Library of Congress catalog and see if they've got that book here, because Salt Lake City is pretty far away to go to the family search or family history library. So, you might find these original or printed records in genealogical and special collections libraries all over the country, in online archives, if they've been digitized. If they haven't been transcribed or put into print form, if it's just the manuscript records, you might need to get them from the original church, from the congregation if it still exists. Or if the records have been archived by a church archive, you might need to go to an archdiocese archive or to a conference archive if it's Methodist or the different kinds of archives that the various churches have, which are all laid out in my book. So, you might find things, surprisingly, when you google them or start digging for them. You might find them in other archives that might really surprise you. Sort of these orphan collections that ended up in a place where you didn't know. If you end up finding things at a congregational office, that's wonderful. If they've been able to keep their records back that far, you can contact them and ask them for copies of the records. If you do that, a few tips for you. Try to look to see on their website are there any instructions for ordering old records? There usually aren't, but it's a good thing to check, and then call ahead. If you can find a phone number or you can message their Facebook page or any other way that church takes communication, try to communicate with them. Find out, do you have some old records, what would be the process for ordering things? Be very respectful. They are not, if you're ordering from a church, their priority is the person who passed away yesterday or the person who is in their office for counseling or the parishioners or congregants that they're meeting with later that day. Their priority is not you, as a genealogist. So, they're concerned with matters administering to the living. So, please be respectful. Please be patient and please include money with your request. Be very specific in the kind of thing you're looking for. Don't say please give me everything you've got on a John Smith. I'm looking for the baptismal record of a John Smith who I think was born about this time, you know, maybe in February of 1863. These are his parents' names. Whatever it is that would help them identify the record and get to it quickly in their own collections. Give them your email address in case they want to send you a scanned version of the document or you might need to enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope. Do they still do those? That's how you used to have to order everything old school. But always be respectful and send, even if they don't request it, send some kind of donation to thank them for their time. So, the Library of Congress has some great materials, and there are some excellent search strategies for finding church records that you can see in a handout that will be provided online with this lecture once it goes online. So, lots of different subject headings that you might browse and see what you find. Yes, sir? [ Inaudible Comment ] So, I'm getting a question about whether there's a reading room for religion or for church. There is one for local history and genealogy. If you're looking through the lens of local history and genealogy, that's a good place to start. Is there a separate place to read for religion? [ Inaudible Comment ] The main reading room includes religion. We have from, that's the, and if you have any other questions about that, right back there. Go see Cheryl. Okay. Good question. You can also look for it. If you can't find what you're looking for in the Library of Congress catalog, I sometimes also just flip to other catalogs that I might have a little bit better luck using, and maybe I'm able to come up with something here, and then once I get an exact title, I can go back to the Library of Congress if I'm here and look to see if they have it. The Family Search Catalog, as I mentioned earlier, this is a free genealogy website, and under search, you can choose the option for a catalog, and then you can search by place and then even by record type. So, my home town of Euclid, Ohio, I did a search for church records, and I found two of them. So, I could go in and see what church records they have for that particular place, and that's a good place to start. And even, so these are the holdings of the family history library in Salt Lake City, some of what have been digitized, and the catalog entry will tell you if it's been digitized. It will link to it, and if it hasn't, it will link you to that particular record in WorldCat so you can look for that holding, whether it's microfilm holding or a print holding at any other library. So, if you're looking for manuscript records, ArchiveGrid is a great catalog of many thousands of archival items at different archives internationally but especially within the United States. So, it's not just archivegrid.org unfortunately, but just google the word archivegrid, and you'll find it. So, you can search for, particularly you can search for archives near a place that you want to research, or you can just search for the name of a particular religious denomination and the place. So, when I run a search on Methodist Episcopal church in Dallas, I find these collections located in archival and manuscript collections across the country, but mostly in Texas. All right. I'm going to leave you here with a couple of specific strategies and stories. First strategy. When I was looking yesterday for my family, I had found this, so just for reference I put a copy of that up in the very top there. Remember that my family was mentioned in a county history as belonging to the Mt. Vernon Cumberland Presbyterian Church. So, great, I took the phrase Mt. Vernon Presbyterian Cumberland church or Mt. Vernon Cumberland Presbyterian. I put that in the Library of Congress catalog, and it brought up a book called History of the Zion Church and cemetery with inscriptions and young .... Well, is this the same church? History of the Zion Church. That doesn't sound like Mt. Vernon Cumberland Presbyterian Church, but because it brought it up for me with this specific church, I went ahead and I clicked on the item and I looked at the catalog, and if you look down at the subjects, it says Zion Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Mt. Vernon Township, Missouri. That's very specific. So, this helps me know if this is or is not a record collection pertaining to my family. And it does tell me that it's also filed under the subject of birth registers and things. So, while we're on this particular screen, I will say that when you do pull up something of interest, but maybe it's not exactly what you're looking for, look to see what other subjects it's under, because you could click on that. If I were looking for any more vital records, like registers of birth in Mt. Vernon Township, I could click on that Library of Congress subject heading to see what other records were marked with that, whether they were or weren't church records. But sometimes you'll see the name of a church or a denomination, and then you can click on that subject heading and see everything in the catalog that's been tagged with that particular subject heading. So, another thing you can do is look for biographies or reminiscences of people who may not have been your ancestors but may either have mentioned them or may have had a life similar to theirs that could offer a window, even sideways into their lives. And that's when I was looking for things for the United Brethren Church in Christ, and I was looking specifically for a particular part of Pennsylvania. I found this biography of a man who served in that church as a minister during a similar time period, in a conference, a neighboring conference. And so, I clicked in, and it was digitized. So this is on the Library of Congress, and it has a digital record that I could go in and pull it up, and when I went to pull it up, I could read his experiences as a minister, and it talked about he never got paid enough, and I figured out that to be the case for my relative as well. They never paid them quite enough, and he had a whole, his nerve-wracking process of being ordained, of submitting his name and being reviewed and the committee meeting and session and that's the little bit that I clipped here, and it helped me imagine this process that I read about in the conference proceedings that I showed you earlier so that I could really get a sense of emotionally what it might have been like for him to undergo that process. So, here's the strategy that I mentioned earlier, and I promised I'd come back to it. How can you use the officiant's name on a marriage certificate to get you to church records? So, from the marriage certificate to finding the priest's affiliation, the parish here, or the clergyman's church or charge they're assigned to, to finding the church record. So, I started with the name, Godfrey Raeber. I know he's a Catholic priest. I know this is 1889. I know this is in Denver. So, I happen to know that the Catholic Church published the Catholic, or the Sadlier's published a Catholic directory every year for many years, and it was during this time period. So, I went and found the 1889 Catholic directory, and I think I googled that exact phrase. And I found the 1889 Catholic directory. It was digitized online. I ran a search for Reverend Raeber's name I didn't find it. So, instead I paged through until I got to the Diocese of Denver, which is now the Archdiocese, but at the time it was the Diocese of Denver, and I just read through all the church assignments until I found Reverend Raeber. He was listed under a slightly different spelling, and that's why I didn't find him before when I did it by OCR. But, you can see there that I did eventually find him as assigned in northeast Denver. He was assigned to the church of St. Ann. Now, I have a name of his congregation. So, I've gone from knowing he's Catholic to knowing what church he's assigned to. And it's the local church records that would have produced that. So, at that point, I got on the phone with the Archdiocese of Denver, every archdiocese has an archive. I googled it. I found the phone number. I called the Archdiocese of Denver. I did run a search on the church of St. Ann, and I got nothing. So, I figured that this was a closed parish, and that turned out to be the case. A lot of us have ancestors who went to churches that no longer exist. That particular little congregation has closed or merged with another one. So, I called the archdioceses in archivist and asked about the records of the church of St. Ann's, and he said, yes, that is a closed parish. What do you need? I have those records here. So, he sent me this record, and for the bride and groom, it gave me a lot more than the civil marriage record did in Colorado, which isn't much. I knew that I could see that on February 28 of 1889, Mike Fox, who was age 23, which I didn't know, I didn't know it was his first marriage. I didn't know he lived in Denver, and I certainly didn't know he was the son of Martin and Francis, and that he was born in Germany. But all of that was in the church record they sent. You can see they just sent me very little snippets. They're respecting the confidentiality of other records, and so they just, they sent me only the things that I needed. The same information was there for the bride. I was able to get her age at the marriage. I knew it was her first marriage, that she lived in Denver, and that she was born in Ohio and her parents' names, at least their first names, and we know her dad's last name. So, I was able to, using the church record of the same event as the civil marriage record, you think, well why would I need two? I already know about the civil marriage record. But it didn't tell you enough. Maybe the church record told you more, and that's what happened here. So, another strategy, if you come across a print record, mine it for manuscript sources. Generally, if they wrote a history of the church, it's because they had some records there that they can consult. And here in this particular one that is sitting over there, that's here at the Library of Congress, it had a whole list of the communicants in 1878. Well, I promise you that the author of this book did not have a memorized list in their head of everyone who is a member of this church in1878. They would have consulted old records. That means that at the time that this book was prepared, those records existed in some form. So, that tells you, you could go look for them. The same thing here, in another part of the book. It references Dr. Lee's journals, saying that there are records of baptisms in there. It has a picture of a young priest from the album of the Mangum family, and then later it says, it references the registers of Saint Andrew's. So, clearly you're seeing in these print records, you're going to learn whatever they tell you, but you're also going to see where else you could look, what records may still survive. Okay, a final tip, denominations change. Like if you were going to say, well, you know, I had an ancestor who was a Puritan, so I'm going to go find the Puritan Church in their little New England town. Are you going to find a Puritan Church? No, like this is the first national church of the Puritans, right. There isn't such a thing. You're laughing, but like this is good to understand. So, the Puritan Church sort of changed over time. They became the Congregationalist church and then lots of other mergers and different kinds of things happened. All these churches have drama, just like families. They have their own family trees, and you can find them on a website called thearda.com. There are denominational family trees like this one that I'm showing you here that tells you if you were looking for a Puritan ancestor or you were looking for somebody who had belonged to the Evangelical and Reformed Church what is that church today? What archives would I go look in? So, it's churches that have changed names, that have merged with other churches, that have maybe gone to defunct as we know them, but their records maybe have been picked up by another denomination. So, it's good to find out the history of a denomination. And you can be resources like this. The individual congregations also have drama too sometimes. Denominations split sometimes over doctrinal issues, sometimes over more mundane things. Sometimes churches closed or they merged with other churches, and sometimes we have these union churches, which were sort of planned mergers of two different denominational churches, local congregations, who were pretty similar in spirit. They could get along and agree on a lot of things, and maybe there were very few people in the neighborhood or in the town that affiliated with either of those churches or that spoke that language, and so they would unite together, share a minister, share a space, and their records may have been also put together and maybe eventually separated again. So, it can be helpful to find out if an ancestor's congregation may have merged with another. So, that kind of thing did happen, because you want to follow the record trail to where those records may be now. Okay. I'm going to, I promised you a couple stories, and that's what I'm going to conclude with. I love this one that I found in, this is a published transcript of a church cemetery burial ground. Looking in the author's commentary in this second paragraph here. Going beyond the bald facts of names and dates presented here, in a thoughtful perusal, one can read the sad record of the cholera epidemics of 1849, '50 and '52, which devastated the city and the smaller epidemic of 1854. One also becomes aware of how difficult life was, how many children were lost in infancy and childhood, and how many adults died in what is now usually a healthy middle age. On the other hand, one sees hints of kindness, a poor person lovingly buried on another's family lot, the good work of the sisters at St. Francis Hospital the efforts of the hardworking pastor who apparently was too ill himself to record the deaths during one week of the 1852 epidemic. If your family was buried here, especially during that time period, you've just been given somebody's insights into what was going on in that community. So, I love this one. These is from my husband's ancestry as I was researching the history of Holy Ghost Parish in [inaudible] county Pennsylvania. I learned this about them, which is wonderful. If you look again, starting the second paragraph. Twenty-one dedicated Slovak families pioneered the effort to establish a parish. During the summer of 1888, they, along with Slovak families from Forest City to Taylor, spearheaded a combined effort to solicit funds for a church. The little frame church was erected by the strength and sweat of men after their regular day's work. This group dug with picks and shovels, often well beyond midnight, until the excavation was completed and the stone foundation placed. And then it goes on to talk about the Cornerstone being blessed. My husband's ancestors were in town. The house backed up right to the back of the church, and they eventually, for a very small amount, sold the back half of their property to the church. They appear throughout the records of this particular church, and I haven't been able to confirm it, but I have a guess that they were part of those 21 dedicated Slovakian families. It certainly helps me understand the sacrifice that would have been required for families like these to have worshipped in their own language, in their new home towns as emigrants. Okay. I'm going to end with my very favorite one, and if anyone has ever tried to sing or has sung in a church choir, you're going to understand the feelings of poor Luther Spelman. He gave a $3 donation to his congregational church provided that chorister will in all cases audibly name the tune before singing and will not sing until the choir have learned the tunes named and will allow all to sing that please. If you're ancestor is Luther Spelman, this is a great story. What a find. So, this is again one of those donation or subscription records that you would find in these old church records. So, you can learn a lot more. It just hit the tip of the iceberg. There's so much that I don't have time to tell you in this short lecture here at the Library of Congress. You can learn more in my book, How To Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records, which is available here today, and you're welcome to get a signed copy or later in the Library of Congress bookstore, or you can buy one online from Genealogical Publishing or from Amazon.com. So, that said, I would love to take your questions. What questions do you have? Any remainder? I've taken a couple throughout. Yes? >> I have done research specifically in a couple of denominations, and what strikes me is that there's a great deal of similarities among church records and I think you're getting at some of this in the work that you're doing, and I look forward to seeing your booking. But do you have a sense that church records, let's say across all the denominations are more similar than they are different? he >> Sunny Jane Morton: So, the question is, who similar are these denominational records, especially some of these membership records that we care about the most or sacramental records, how similar will they be across denominations? It will depend on the doctrine of the church. Some churches didn't baptize, or they only baptized adults. So, you might find different kinds of records. I would say that by and large some of our Episcopalian, Methodist, Catholic, many of these records are going to be quite complete genealogically and great genealogical finds. Unfortunately, many of our Baptist churches did not record as much about their members. I think they were busy living full religious lives and didn't write things down. So, there's not as much often in the Baptist records, and that's a very general statement, and exceptions are certainly going to apply. And you'll find a lot more, there are specific chapters on individual denominations in the book that describe what you might expect to find and what language it's in and how to understand their terminology and things like that in the book. Any other questions? Yes? Yes, sir? >> Just generally to shed some light, what determines whether the church's archives [inaudible] like the Library of Congress. >> Sunny Jane Morton: Okay, he's asking a question about how you would know, how you might anticipate where church records might be archived. That's an excellent question, and it kind of gets at the history of archiving itself. Generally, if a church is still in existence, and if it belongs, if it's not an independent church, if it belongs to a larger denominational structure, often there will be a policy for archiving records, and sometimes they'll say maintain your old records unless you can't, and then send them to us or send them to our archive. So, there may be policies for an individual denomination. And some of those policies may not have been put into place until the mid-1900s or later even because there was not a strong history of having archives like this, especially denominational archives or regional archives. You really didn't find these coming into being until maybe after the churches had already archived their records someplace else. So, it just kind of would depend on when they would have archived. The other thing to consider is that there are some faiths here in the United States that started their own colleges. And many times, it's their colleges that have special collections libraries where one of their special collections might be the records of this particular denomination, maybe a little German denomination that is a real sort of a niche topic that they have collected. So, it really kind of, it depends, but that's, hopefully that is a good start. Thank you very much for being here. I'm happy to answer more questions afterwards. [ Applause ]