ROOTS & BRANCHES

One of the best things a genealogy speaker can do is listen.

Especially when thinking about topics for the future.

And especially in our current world in which much family history programming is delivered in a virtual environment, it pays to the fully engaged with what is being said. I found this to be the case recently when I listened to Dawn King Carson presenting for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on the topic of “Locating Church Records in Pennsylvania.”

Carson’s lecture was one that if I had needed to travel to hear I might well not have taken the time to go to the society’s headquarters in downtown Philadelphia.

But since it was delivered in a Zoom format, it was convenient to listen in, and I found some good information that may turn into future lecture topics that I will present.

But first a bit about why Carson’s presentation was so helpful. She went over the various religious denominations in Pennsylvania and gave some great Internet links for accessing the records of these different church bodies.

She also profiled each denominations categories of records, which is important since not all faiths keep track of the same types of actions.

While it was beyond the detail allowed by Carson’s time constraints, her presentation got me thinking about how difficult it can be to access a particular congregation’s original records.

As with the types of records kept, the custody of such records varies from denomination to denomination and sometimes from one congregation to another—even in the same denomination.

A fair number of church congregations have “gone out of business” over time and for these churches the location of their records can be particularly difficult to track down.

In some cases, the defunct congregation is officially merged into another one and the surviving congregation has records for the predecessor.

But other times the out-of-existence church might have simply dissolved, in which case its records may go to a denominational archives … or being donated to a society or university library … or even remain with someone who was a member of the congregation when it closed up shop.

It also doesn’t help that some congregations would rename themselves when a new church building was constructed.

Other considerations include whether a denomination’s organizational structure is hierarchical (top down, as with Roman Catholics) or congregational (such as the Reformed churches) since the former might be more organized in their approach and the latter more haphazard.

One final note: While it’s not Pennsylvania specific the recently published book from Sunny Jane Morton and Harold A. Henderson titled How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records: A Genealogist’s Guide is an excellent background book for this type of research.