President's Pen - November 2024
Every genealogist knows that hidden within the vast wealth of genealogical sources are clues just waiting to be discovered. Sunny Morton’s presentation is about one of the sources we tend to overlook. It is not as obvious as the items on our usual check list – census, immigration, birth, marriage, death, military, and tax records – but it can lead to new discoveries about our ancestors. What is this source you ask? The answer is U. S. Church Records!
Sunny opened her talk with the rhetorical question, “Why Church Records?” The simplest answer is because we may eventually need them to fill in some important blanks in our family history, such as birthplace, original spelling of names, migration patterns. Church records can also act as substitutes for missing civil records. Archival registers and sacramental records can hold clues to birthplace, birth, marriage, death and burial locations. Letters of transfer from one church to another can illustrate migration patterns giving insight as to where other resources may be found.
Burial and remembrance cards can help in locating a church record. Obituaries in newspapers often list the officiant, church or chapel, and cemetery which can direct your search into new directions. Marriage records can also be enlightening as to family origins. Take the case of my maternal second great-grandfather, Dennis Weed, and his wife, Rhoda Henrietta Sisson, who married in the Protestant Dutch Reform Church of Leeds, in Greene County, New York in 1839. I was curious as to why they were married in this denomination. Looking back one more generation I discovered that Dennis’s mother, Catherine Chrisler/Kreussler was the descendant of Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam which opened an entire new line of research to me.
Knowing your ancestor’s ethnicity can be a vital clue as to where to look for church records. Once I discovered that my father’s ancestral line was German Catholic, it was almost child’s play to follow the clues in the church baptismal and burial records. At this time, I want to acknowledge the invaluable help I received from my husband’s cousin who was the archivist at the St. Louis Archdiocese. She sent me marriage, baptismal, and burial records for my Weis line which had been my brick wall for years. Lastly, my maternal Swedish grandmother, Esther Östman Weed’s line was easy to follow, if not easily translated, because the Swedish Lutheran Church lists everything in their church records, including when they moved to another country.
Using Sunny Morton’s book, How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records, can help to fill in your record gaps and open entirely new avenues of research. Church records can be a valuable aid to genealogical research and can even lead you backward to find ancestors you might have never found through any other documents. And, if you are lucky enough to descend from Quakers, you will enjoy the wealth of records that detail your ancestor’s daily lives. Let us know how church records helped to bring down one of your brick walls.
Happy searching!