Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is a discussion with Alice Childs about finding probate and church records for Pennsylvania German ancestors. We discuss the probate process and the resulting records. We also talk about using FamilySearch to browse to probate books at the county level. Pennsylvania was known as a place for religious tolerance, and many Germans of different denominations settled in the same places. We talk about how to find out what church your ancestor belonged to and what records might be available. Alice shares some examples.
Transcript
Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 210 Pennsylvania Germans part for probate entered records. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional.
Nicole (41s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Hello and welcome to Research Like a Pro.
Diana (47s):
Hi Nicole, how are you today?
Nicole (49s):
Fantastic. I’ve been working on a French Canadian research project. That’s been a very interesting and fun way to learn about those records.
Diana (58s):
Well, that’s great. That’s a new locality for you,
Nicole (1m 1s):
Right? I’ve been working with a researcher on our team who specializes in French Canadian. So I reviewed the project and then just kind of noticed a couple of things I wanted to add. And so one of the things I noticed was that we had found in 1851, Canada census, and back then it was just a Canada, east, Canada west. They had divided it up into like territories basically, and they didn’t have one unified Canada census, but the census instructions wanted people to be enumerated a certain way, but the way that the enumerator had done it had more details than they were supposed to. So what I thought was interesting on this particular family is that the exact parishes of birth had been written down for where they were born.
Nicole (1m 46s):
And then it had been crossed off. And some like a later a numerator had written Canada, French.
Diana (1m 54s):
Wow. That’s awesome. How funny that they cross off the really good information,
Nicole (1m 59s):
Right? You need to follow the directions here. And some of the things that had been done were wrong, like the way that they had done it, they had put marks in the first row for all the family, as far as like male, female, and that kind of thing, because they had different columns for, it was kind of interesting. So they had written two and one all in the same row. And then later they came in, rewrote the names and read it all the tallies because each family had their own page kind of like in the British censuses in the later years. Right. It was just a very helpful enumeration because I could read, but it was crossed off. And I could see where each of those three family members were born and the exact parish, which led to finding some parish registers for the Catholic parish in St.
Nicole (2m 49s):
Fabian Quebec. And those were not indexed as part of the main like drew or drown collection. I don’t know how to say that, but in, and so that’s usually like the main collection you would search, but I ended up going to family search for those parish registers. They were digitized there and going page by page, found another burial for one of the family’s children and found that they had twins that were baptized there in that parish as well. And one of the twins never showed up on a census record because he died. So I found a lot of great information just from really like looking closely at that 1851 census and trying to read what was underneath the crossed out stuff.
Diana (3m 33s):
Well, that’s a fabulous example of really looking at your starting point information. So for announcements, we have our next research, like a pro study group beginning on September 7th. And we are excited to meet with a whole new group of people or some of our people that are repeating. We have a lot of people like to this study group over and over, so they can work on their projects and get lots of help. So if you’re interested in joining us, be sure and register for that. And with that, let’s get to our episode. We’re so excited to have Alice back. Hi Alice.
Alice Childs (4m 8s):
Hi. How are you today?
Diana (4m 9s):
We have had Alice here with this now for a few episodes. And today we are going to talk all about probate records. We’ve talked about land and immigration and why the German, our Pennsylvania, German ancestors might have come to the new world. And we have a whole new record set to talk about today.
Alice Childs (4m 32s):
Well, I think we’ve talked about how Pennsylvania Germans were looking for land. That’s one of the big things that they were seeking when they came and they wanted to obtain land as soon as they possibly could. And so along with land, once they die, the distribution of their land and passing it on to their family was also really important. So probate records are important records set for Pennsylvania, German ancestors. So when someone died, their estate needed to be distributed among their heirs, and they really wanted to make sure that they could pass their land down to their children. So there are a lot of genealogical valuable things that we can find in probate records.
Alice Childs (5m 14s):
And I’m sure your listeners know these, but we’ll just review. First of all, probate records, they were created before a lot of other record types. So they might be one of the only records that you can find for individuals in early time periods. And they often state the names of family members in their relationships, which is obviously very valuable. And you can also glean information about a person’s death date, even if it’s not stated in the records, the real will would have been written on one date and proved by another date. So, you know, that that person has died between that time period. And when the estate was probated is usually somewhat close to the death date. So you can be estimating those dates.
Alice Childs (5m 53s):
Also going back to the fan club, the witnesses and executors and administrators of the estate are often family members and friends. So studying these individuals is really important when you’re researching your Pennsylvania German ancestors. So one thing to keep in mind with probate records is that although they’re really valuable, they don’t exist for every individual I read and family search has a probate records class and in that or a handout, and in that handout, it states that it’s estimated that prior to 1900, only about 10% of persons created a will. And only about 25% of a states were probated, regardless of whether or not there was a will.
Alice Childs (6m 35s):
So that’s something to keep in mind. I think, you know, we see that someone own land and we automatically think, well, there must be probate records. And we get really frustrated when we can’t find them, but sometimes they just don’t exist.
Diana (6m 46s):
That’s right. Sometimes they devise that land to their descendants before they passed away. And so, you know, there may be a deed showing that, or maybe they just gave it away and there is no record showing that land being divided up among the heirs. And one of the things that I learned, I think in England probate was that even though only about 10% of people actually have a will or probate that up to 25% may be named in one. So it is so good to really work on the probate. And even if your person is not named in one, or it’s not the person who did the will, or it’s not their probate, they could be a witness and be part of the fan club.
Alice Childs (7m 35s):
That’s another great example of how valuable the fan club is.
Nicole (7m 39s):
So what is the probate process and what kind of records will result from all of that?
Alice Childs (7m 44s):
The most basic thing that you need to understand about the probate process is that if a person died with a will, the terminology is testate and intestate means that the decedent did not leave a will. And so different records will be created, but the process was similar. So I’ll just run through the process a little bit. So when someone died, a petition was filed by the executor or the executive tricks, if there was a will. And if there was not a will, the widow or another family member, maybe one of the sons or another interested party would be the executor or petition. They would petition the probate court to let them know that the person had died. And then the estate would enter probate.
Alice Childs (8m 25s):
If the person left a will, then the witnesses testified in court that the decedent was of a sound mind when he or she wrote the will. And that results in an acknowledgement of witnesses. If nobody appeared to contest the will, then the will is considered valid or approved. And if it was not proved valid, then it was considered an intestate case. So when there was a will, the executor was granted letters, testamentary, and that allowed them to proceed with the distribution of the estate. And if there wasn’t will, then the court appointed an administrator and issued what are known as letters of administration. So those are all documents that you should be able to find associated with the estate.
Alice Childs (9m 6s):
So once they had the letters, testamentary, or letters of administration, then they would proceed with taking care of all the estate matters. So the executor or administrator would hire two or three people who were usually not related. They were unbiased to take an inventory of the estate and the inventory included a list of all the person’s personal belongings and the value. And then the items were sold. The estate sale, often family members would buy the items. So taking note of who purchased the items is really important for that fan club research. You can, you can note who was there to purchase these items, then study those people and find out how they were related.
Alice Childs (9m 47s):
Once they were ready to sell the items that resulted in a vendor list. So vendor is another word for a public auction. And again, like I said, you can look at that vendor list and see who bought the items during the estate sale. So after everything was sold and taken care of the executor or administrator would pay the debts owed by the estate and collect money owed to the decedent. And there were records kept of these transactions. So you will often find a number of receipts and accounts and different things in the estate file. And when all the bills were paid and the money was collected, then the estate got distributed to the heirs. And that’s known as the estate distribution, if there was a will, that was done according to the person’s wishes.
Alice Childs (10m 30s):
And if not, then there were laws, state laws that came into play in Pennsylvania. The law was that the widow was given one third dour, right? And then the remaining two thirds was divided among the surviving children and errors. And one thing to really take note of is that in 18th century, Pennsylvania, the oldest son was given two equal shares. So if you see a list of I, in my blog post, I have an example, but there is, you know, it says the widow received a certain amount. And then the one son got a certain amount and the other children got these amounts. And if you look at it and do a little math, you can see that the widow got one third, one son got two third, you know, two equal shares.
Alice Childs (11m 11s):
And then the rest of the children got a smaller share. So you can, you can find out about the family a little bit, just through that distribution,
Nicole (11m 21s):
Doing a little math and figuring out a little bit of things you can find the oldest son.
Alice Childs (11m 26s):
Yeah. So that’s pretty cool. As the air is received, their portions of the state, they would then sign a release that stated what they received and, and that they had actually received it. And also if the decedent left minor children, there will be a guardianship bond where a guardian is assigned in Pennsylvania. The court appointed guardians for children who were younger than 14. And if the children were over 14, they could choose their own guardian. And guardian was not the person who the child would go live with. It was a person who would take care of their financial interests and make sure they were provided for. So in Pennsylvania, there are different courts that were in charge of handling the probate related duties.
Alice Childs (12m 8s):
The register of wills was responsible for wills and administration papers for intestate estates, and they recorded the wills and administration dockets and indexes. Then we have another court, the orphans court, and they were in charge of the real estate divisions and account auditing and just financial, the financial interest and care of minor errors. So just be aware that you might find the records in two different courts.
Nicole (12m 36s):
That’s good to know. And that was a really good point. You also made about the guardianships accounts and things that, you know, they’re not actually taking care of the children in their house per se, but just their financial accounts. So when you were talking about all these different papers, that reminded me of my research lately that I did on Humphrey Arnold, and he didn’t live in Pennsylvania. But when I was looking at his probate file from Virginia, it was kind of like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. I was looking at his inventory and then also the sale of his effects and things. And just trying to put all these pieces together, like why did this person pay rent to the estate?
Nicole (13m 17s):
And why are they does that mean that they were a child? Because I thought they were a child was couple was a child. And anyway, it’s tricky to sometimes knowing exactly what it all means, but it can give you so many clues that when you write it up in a report, you can really pull in all these different pieces of evidence from these receipts and these accounts and inventory sales and all of the things.
Alice Childs (13m 40s):
Yeah. It really does help you piece together the family. And you, you might have to look in several different places to find all of the, all of the papers. You know, I did a slick course on researching your Pennsylvania Germans. And we did a probate exercise and we had to go to several different places to pull together all the different papers that were created for this estate. So if you look in one place in there, all these papers, aren’t there don’t give up because you might find them in different repositories or different databases.
Nicole (14m 13s):
Oh, that’s a really good hint too.
Diana (14m 16s):
Yeah. You’ve given us a lot of food for thought with that. Well, with all the value of probate records, now we need to talk about actually finding them. So how do you locate probate records for your Pennsylvania German ancestors?
Alice Childs (14m 30s):
Okay. So you alluded to some of these things will books and the orphans court dockets have been filmed for most counties in Pennsylvania and administration dockets have been microfilmed for some. So a lot of these will be online. So the process that I do when I’m searching for Pennsylvania probate records is I go first to a collection at ancestry called Pennsylvania wills and probate records. And they have images of probate records for a lot of Pennsylvania’s counties, but they aren’t necessarily complete. It’s like what you were saying, Diana. Sometimes maybe you’ll just get an index or maybe it’s just the will book, you know, so you can go there first to see what they have because it’s name searchable.
Alice Childs (15m 11s):
So that’s why I go there first that that’s easy to get started finding the person of interest. When the only record you discover in that collection is an index, or you don’t feel like you’re finding all the records, you can use the information provided at ancestry and then go to family searches, browse only collection. So they have the collection, Pennsylvania probate records, 1683 to 1994. And you can browse the books and go to the correct book and find the will that way, or the files. Some, some probate records were written in English for Pennsylvania Germans, but they could have also been written in German. So just be aware that you might be finding some German records and go back to our German handwriting.
Alice Childs (15m 52s):
And translation helps that we talked about in episode 2 0 8, if you don’t find any records by searching at ancestry, or they seem incomplete when you go to family search, just do a place search for the county of interest and then browse to see what’s available there. And just like with deeds, the, the organization of the records will vary from county to county. There might be books. There might be a state files that are packets and the estate files are really interesting. Some of them contain a key at the beginning of each file, and this is really helpful. The kids know what documents are included in the file. So when you’re looking at the browse, all images, you can kind of see where the key is.
Alice Childs (16m 35s):
And it’s a page that’s very different from all the other pages in each file. So you can easily see where each packet starts and it will tell you exactly what’s contained in that file and it’s just initials. So you need to go to the key, to the key, which is at the beginning of the film, and that will tell you what everything stands for you. So you can see exactly what’s contained in that file. I think those keys at the very beginning of each microfilm are really helpful because they provide a lot of other information too. They provide information about Pennsylvania, German history, description of naming variations and patterns, descriptions of the records. Sometimes they have a map of the county and names of townships and formation dates.
Alice Childs (17m 18s):
I mean, there’s some really valuable information in those little keys at the beginning of the probate estate packet. So I think that’s really valuable just to go and look at that if you’re researching in that area.
Diana (17m 29s):
Oh yeah, absolutely. You always want to go try to look at the entire fight.
Alice Childs (17m 34s):
Yeah, there’s great. Great information at the beginning of those estate file films. So it might be fun if you have someone who is in that county, but you aren’t even sure if they have probate records to just go look at that, to see what information you can glean about the locality. So anyway, family search and ancestry are really helpful for probate records for Pennsylvania. And I just worked on a case not too long ago, and it wasn’t a Pennsylvania case, but I even found wills of two women at a little historical society in a town in New York. And they were really fantastic and helped me tie together the whole family. And they weren’t, they never were filed with the court. So, you know, it’s worthwhile to track down probate records in any place that you think you might be able to find them.
Alice Childs (18m 19s):
So contacting courthouses, but also don’t forget about local historical societies and family papers that might’ve been donated.
Diana (18m 26s):
Yeah, those are all great tips for finding probate records and just doing an exhaustive search. If you think there’s something else out there.
Nicole (18m 36s):
Wow. I didn’t realize that people might have a will that would be not filed with the court and then be sitting in a historical society. So that’s a really good tip
Alice Childs (18m 46s):
In this particular case, it was for women and they had no land or it was personal possessions, you know, but they were great records.
Nicole (18m 54s):
Well, let’s transition into talking about church records and I know that church records can be super helpful for Pennsylvania Germans because in some of my own research I’ve done in the past, that’s kind of a lot of where the information that I found was located. So tell us about, you know, what church records are available and are they helpful and how are they helpful for Pennsylvania Germans?
Alice Childs (19m 16s):
Okay. Church records are one of my favorite record types for Pennsylvania. Germans. They’re really important in Pennsylvania German research because Germans tended to keep really good records and they can be really valuable. And most original records for the Pennsylvania Germans were in German, but a lot of them have been transcribed and published many times. That’s the only thing you can find is the published transcriptions, but it’s worthwhile to look for the originals. As in any case, just be aware that sometimes those originals have disappeared and you won’t be able to find them. But church records are really valuable because Pennsylvania didn’t require the registration of vital records until 1906.
Alice Childs (19m 57s):
Some counties did record births, marriages, and deaths for different time periods, like from 1851 to 1855, for some reason, they have records. And then in 1893 through 1905 counties did have those vital records in some cases. But for the most part, the church records are where you’re going to be looking to be able to find the births, marriages and deaths of people are Pennsylvania Germans. So church records were usually kept in a register by the local clergymen. And like I said, you, they might have baptism marriage and burial records. The baptism records often give both a birth and the baptism date, but sometimes they don’t.
Alice Childs (20m 39s):
And the death record probably will only just give the death date. They might say their age. It just depends on how the clergymen wanted to keep the, but obviously the baptism is usually close to the child’s birth date and burial, which happened right after a death. So these records can provide a really close date for those events. There are other church records besides the birth marriage and burial records that can provide really useful information. Some of those are confirmation records and membership lists there’s records that talk about when a person was admitted to the congregation, and those might say where they came from, and then when they removed from the congregation and where they went.
Alice Childs (21m 19s):
So they can be really useful for tracking the migration of your ancestor. The communicant lists are really valuable for identifying the fan clubs. So the communicant lists are a list of people who came to church on the same day together. So if they attend church together, they probably knew one another. And you can use those records to build the fan club. Some churches didn’t start keeping records right when they were founded, but they did start fairly soon after their founding and church records for Pennsylvania, Germans are really abundant and they are just such a valuable source of information in our research.
Nicole (21m 56s):
That is a great list. And I like that you mentioned some of those lesser known type of records, too. That could be helpful confirmations. They communicate lists often with church records, we focus just on those baptism marriage and burials, but you know, sometimes those other lists can be really helpful in piecing together a family too. And I heard a case study once at an Institute course where the teacher had people of the same name in the same area and trying to figure out which children belong to, which parents was really challenging. And so he actually used some communicant lists to figure it all out.
Alice Childs (22m 31s):
That’s really cool. They can be really valuable. So I think sometimes we discount those types of records because they don’t state a relationship or a birthday. You know, they don’t state those big pieces of information that we’re really hoping to find. And so we kind of skip past them, but we really do need to use them and get as much information from them as we can.
Nicole (22m 48s):
Right. And he even said that it was really hard to get those lists because even one of the publications that he was using for the church or the genealogist who had put it together had said, these lists weren’t included because they’re not technologically relevant. And so he had to go find them the original somewhere else. Can you that they were out there somewhere just that they weren’t in that publication?
Alice Childs (23m 6s):
Yeah. Can be tricky.
Diana (23m 8s):
It’s so interesting to hear what people think is genealogically relevant because we think every little item is relevant. All right. So Alice, now we need to figure out what church our ancestor belonged to because there were several different denominations and it’s always tricky figuring out which church records we should start to search for.
Alice Childs (23m 29s):
It does make a difference. You have to know which church they belong to. So you can find the records, right? So there were a lot of different religions that Pennsylvania Germans belong to Pennsylvania was known as a place for religious tolerance. So it was attractive to people of different and Germans of many different denominations came and settled in the same places. One resource that I love is the book by Sunny Morton and Harold Henderson about church records. And they’ve wrote about this. They said in the 18 hundreds, Berks county, Pennsylvania had Germans who are Lutheran Baptist, Catholic reformed Mennonite, Amish United brother in Christ, Moravian church of the brethren members of splinter groups of these faiths.
Alice Childs (24m 13s):
And more so you can see there were a lot of different religious denominations that came with our Pennsylvania German ancestors. So in order to identify which denomination they belong to, you can sometimes look at more recent descendants of your Pennsylvania, German ancestors and see what church they belong to, and then trace that back. And it might not be the same church in the time period that ancestor was alive as it was earlier in time, because there are splinter groups and things evolved, but that can be a great clue. Learning about the history of those denominations will help. But one of the best strategies that I have found to find which church our Pennsylvania German ancestors belong to is to learn what churches were in the area at the time your ancestor lived there.
Alice Childs (24m 59s):
So county histories are a great resource for this and county histories. They’ll often talk about the earliest churches and include the names of clergymen who presided over those churches. So you can find county histories, family search has a lot of family histories, just do a place search in the catalog, do it by county, and then scroll down to histories for that. And you can also find county histories on internet archive and Hottie trust and Google books. There are a lot of places where you can find county histories. So that’s one thing I recommend. If you’re wanting to identify your ancestor’s denomination, just look and see what churches were there at the time.
Alice Childs (25m 39s):
And then you can go from there and try to find other clues cemetery records. You know, sometimes headstones will say something, or if they’re buried in a church cemetery, that’s a really good clue that that’s the church that they belonged to. It’s really important to know that before churches were established, a lot of denominations had traveling clergy known as circuit writers, and they would ride from one settlement to the next and have services and perform baptisms and marriages. And his records would all be kept in the same book. And usually he kept that book in his possession and it wasn’t really associated with a particular church building. So if you’re able to find those records, that’s really good.
Alice Childs (26m 19s):
When I was trying to find out where to look for a marriage record for my ancestor, Jacob Fisher, that we’ve been talking about, I read about Reverend Abraham bloomer, and I found him in a history of Lehigh county. And he was a traveling preacher in north Hampton county, Pennsylvania from 1773 to 1787, which was the time period that I was interested in. And he was, oh, he oversaw the three white hall charges. And white hall is the township where Jacob Fisher lived. So that work was digitized by the family history library. And I was able to look at it on families Birch. And I’ll talk a little bit more about what I found in his book a little bit later.
Nicole (26m 59s):
Nice. I can’t wait to hear about that. That sounds like a really interesting story. They’re a little teaser.
Alice Childs (27m 4s):
Yeah.
Diana (27m 6s):
Well, I think it’s so fun to think about discovering the denomination of her ancestors. I know in some of my research that they would just go to whatever church was there, you know, if they belong to a denomination and there wasn’t a group there, they would just go find something that was similar. And so we have to keep that in mind.
Nicole (27m 30s):
So let’s go back to your ancestors church and thinking about how important is it to understand the theology of the ancestors church.
Alice Childs (27m 40s):
It’s really important because their beliefs and practices play into what records were created and the Sonny and Henderson’s book does talk a lot about theology. So this is a great resource to learn more about theology, but most Anabaptists faiths practiced. What’s known as believer baptism, which is adult baptism. They thought that people should be able to choose whether or not they believed and wanted to be baptized and other churches practiced infant baptism. So if you’re looking for baptism records for an infant, you will not find them. If you’re Pennsylvania, German ancestor belong to a church that didn’t practice infant baptism, another theology or practices who qualified to be witnesses.
Alice Childs (28m 23s):
So I have a chart in my blog posts. Sometimes the witnesses were required to be well-schooled in the religious tenets of their faith. Sometimes it was a family member or, you know, different people were qualified to be witnesses. So knowing that can help you identify family members based on who the witnesses were. And there’s just a great discussion about all of this in the book, how to find your family history in us church records that we’ve been talking about. Another theological consideration is whether the church required the parents of the infant to be members of the church. Some churches did have that requirement and other churches would let anyone baptize their child in their church.
Alice Childs (29m 6s):
So Michael Lackapoe suggested in my sled course to remember the acronym clam C L a M Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Moravians would baptize anyone. They would allow anyone to be baptized into their church. So this was important because sometimes if you can’t find a baptism record for your ancestor in the church where you think that they attended, then you can check the records for those other churches to see if they happen to be baptized in one of those churches. And, you know, the reasoning why they would do this as perhaps there wasn’t a church close to them of their faith, or maybe the preacher only came at certain times and they wanted to have their child baptized.
Alice Childs (29m 47s):
And if one of the other face would baptize them, they felt like that was a good option. So it’s really important to know that you can look beyond the denomination that your ancestor was a member of for records.
Nicole (29m 60s):
I really like this table that you put into the blog post about the theology and records of the different German denominations. That’s really helpful. And it’s good to think about Kennedy’s considerations of what the church has allowed. And it’s kind of giving me some ideas to think about. So thanks. So believer, baptism means they wouldn’t have had infant baptisms in some of these people in the chart, it has a note about emergency baptism. So what is that?
Alice Childs (30m 28s):
So emergency baptism was some churches would authorize a baptism to be performed by anyone. The parents could baptize the child. And that would happen if like, if the child was not, well, if they were born prematurely or if, for whatever reason, they thought that infant wasn’t going to live, they really wanted to have that child baptized before they died. And so the parents were authorized to go ahead and perform that baptism
Nicole (30m 50s):
Were those recorded. Do you know
Alice Childs (30m 52s):
Sometimes, but sometimes not. It just depends on the family and the availability of a preacher.
Nicole (31m 0s):
That would make sense why sometimes they’re not recorded because I’ve found a burial records for children and I can’t find baptisms for them. So I wonder if, you know, they maybe had an emergency baptism by the parents and then the burial record was performed by the parish priest. So he recorded the burial only.
Alice Childs (31m 18s):
Yeah, yeah. That could very well be.
Diana (31m 21s):
You have also written a little bit about union churches, which I have never heard of. So tell us about union churches in Pennsylvania.
Alice Childs (31m 29s):
Union churches are really an interesting concept, but it makes perfect sense. When you think about it. When our German ancestors arrived in Pennsylvania, they, they lived together and worked together and they formed this tight knit community. And they were really reliant on one another. And often there would be a little group of Lutheran church members and a few others that were of the reformed faiths. And they, there wouldn’t be very many pastors and not a lot of resources. And so they would use, what’s known as union churches to overcome these obstacles. So they banded together and they would build a shared church building. So they could also share the pastor and then they would have worship services.
Alice Childs (32m 9s):
Maybe every other week, the Lutherans would have services one week and the reformed members would have services the other week. And that way they could share the resources. And it really created a sense of community among the members of these two different faiths. They would socialize together and, you know, just really intermingled with one another. They would inter marry and they didn’t feel like the spouse had to join the other church. They would just stick with the religion that they were with. And if they had children, a lot of times the daughters that were born into a mixed marriage would be baptized in the faith tradition of the mother. And then the sons would be baptized in the same church as the father.
Alice Childs (32m 49s):
So the records for these churches are interesting. Sometimes the records would be in separate books. Usually they were probably kept in separate books, but they might’ve been recorded in separate sections of the same record book. I’ve seen that before where the first half of the book was for the Lutheran records and the second half of the book was for the reformed records. So it’s just important to remember that that happened a lot and that you might not be able to distinguish which religion they were for sure if they were all recorded in the same book, but they were pretty good about keeping their records separately. So just be aware that that is what happened a lot.
Diana (33m 25s):
Well, that makes perfect sense that they would need to find a church and maybe wouldn’t have quite the right denomination. So they joined with another group. So I’m so glad to have learned about that. That was something brand new to me, this whole idea called union churches.
Alice Childs (33m 41s):
It’s so interesting to learn about, you know, it’s such a different world than what we live in now. And people wanted to be able to practice our religion and hear sermons. And it’s interesting to see how it all played out.
Nicole (33m 55s):
That was a really good point. You made about how they might keep the records in the same book. So if you look through the first half and don’t find your ancestor, you got to keep going to the second half.
Alice Childs (34m 5s):
Yeah. It’s interesting to see what you find when you dive into the church records.
Nicole (34m 11s):
Yeah. Let’s talk about discovering where these church records are held. So how do you do that?
Alice Childs (34m 18s):
Well, after you’ve overcome the first hurdle of identifying their religious denomination and their beliefs, finding the churches that were near your ancestor’s home and what pastor served in their area are all clues that will help you locate the records for the church. So if you find that the church is still operating, the records could be held there. And I will often just Google the church and churches, websites will a lot of times have kind of a history page and it’ll talk about when they were established and different things. And so it’s nice to look at their websites and just find out if they’re still around and working, the records might be there. If they’re still in existence, if not, they might’ve been moved to a regional denominational archives.
Alice Childs (34m 60s):
Other records can be found at libraries and historical societies, or sometimes they’re in the possession of private individuals. One record set that I was looking at for my fourth-generation project. I had the transcribed records and there was a note that said the originals were held. They were in the possession of miss somebody, you know, this woman’s name, who was a time member of the church. And so I spent some time trying to track down. I found some of her relatives, I wasn’t ever able to get ahold of anyone who knew where those church records had gone, but just know that church records could have gone anywhere. So you kind of need to search around for where they might’ve gone. But a lot Pennsylvania, German church records have been translated into English and transcribed.
Alice Childs (35m 42s):
And they’ve been put into books, which is such a gift for the genealogy community. And a lot of these are microfilmed and available online family search has a lot of Pennsylvania church records, and some of those have been gathered into record collections. So you have your Pennsylvania bursts and christenings and Pennsylvania marriages and Pennsylvania church marriages and Pennsylvania desks and burials. Those are collections that family search. And so those are indexed and searchable. And so a lot of times I start there and they’re mostly indexes. Sometimes you’ll have a link to the record itself. It’s a really great starting point. But if you don’t find your ancestor in those collections, don’t think that the records don’t exist because sometimes I have found even within the same family, I can find a baptism record for one of the kids in the Pennsylvania bursts and christenings database, but not another one, even though they were baptized in the same church.
Alice Childs (36m 36s):
I don’t know why that happens, but just know that that’s not like the starting and ending point when you’re looking for your church records, those are good places to start. But if you don’t find your ancestor, then move to the family search catalog and do a play search for your county and scroll down to church records. So when I was searching for Abraham bloomer that I talked about earlier, I wanted to find his records and I went to the family search catalog and search for his name. And there, it brought up a typed and digitized transcription of his record book. And that included an entry for the marriage of Jacob Fisher and a woman named Elizabeth Horman, which was really exciting because I hadn’t didn’t know who I knew his wife’s name was Elizabeth, but I didn’t have a maiden name for her.
Alice Childs (37m 22s):
And so it was really exciting. And so I just want to point out though, that this transcription is a really good example of how mistakes can be made, because that was the only entry for Jacob Fisher in that particular transcribed record. But I was at the family history library. And just by chance, I, I had seen that there was another book, a physical book on the shelf, and I wasn’t going to look at it cause I thought, well, I’ve already looked at those records online, so I don’t need to look at it, but I was just there and I pulled it out and it was actually a handwritten transcription. And there was another entry for a Jacob Fisher, Mary too. And Elizabeth Klein just a few years later.
Alice Childs (38m 3s):
So I just, by using the fan club and a timeline of the births of their children, I’ve decided that Elizabeth Klein was probably the mother of Jacob and Elizabeth. Fisher’s known children because their first daughter Susanna was born just a year, year and a half after they were married. And one of the sponsors for her baptism was Catarina Klein. And so I think that she’s a better candidate for the mother, but Jacob Fisher may have been married twice. And there are some children who were born earlier that could have been the children of that earlier wife. So I’m still researching to find out if those are two different men or the same who married twice, but just goes to show that you have to hunt and make sure that you’re looking at all the available resources. And don’t just stop with one.
Nicole (38m 45s):
So one tip, I guess, would be, if you have a typed record, go look for a handwritten one.
Alice Childs (38m 52s):
Yeah. Or try to find, I mean, just like with any other record, try to find the originals if possible, but just know that there might’ve been different transcriptions created too, so that you can look at the different transcriptions and catch errors that way.
Nicole (39m 5s):
Yeah. Just doing everything, like, I guess reasonably exhaustive research, right. Because both of those were trade transcriptions, right? Neither of them were originals.
Alice Childs (39m 13s):
Nope. They weren’t originals. They were both transcriptions, but one had an extra and it would be interesting to see, to compare the whole record. It wasn’t that long. It’d be interesting to see how many omissions there were or differences, you know, but that was one that I spotted because it was my person I was looking for, like,
Nicole (39m 31s):
Why wasn’t this included in the other one?
Alice Childs (39m 34s):
Yeah. So there’s another really great resource for finding Pennsylvania church records. It’s the WPA inventories. So the works progress administration. I can’t remember the exact name of it, but president Roosevelt created this and wanted people to have jobs to work. And so one of the projects they did was to inventory church, our archives and Pennsylvania’s WP, PA inventories are available. They created a summary of, it would be the church’s official name and the different addresses that they had over time. The inventory includes information about the founder, a little bit of history about the church and who the current pastor was at that time in the 1930s.
Alice Childs (40m 18s):
And then they created an inventory of books and records created by the church. So it will tell you if there’s a baptism register or deaths or marriages, you know, what records are available for that church and where they were held in 1930. So that can give you some really good clues about what records were ex extent at the time and lead you to search for where they are now. And those, the WPA inventories have been digitized and they’re browsable by county at ancestry. So just go to ancestry and look for the w Pennsylvania WPA inventories and look at the county of interest and see which churches were in the area and what records were available.
Alice Childs (40m 59s):
So that is a really great resource to identify churches in different counties.
Nicole (41m 4s):
How great, I wonder if there are some records that were extended in the 1930s that we don’t have any more. So the WPA was really helpful with sometimes capturing some records that we wouldn’t have any more if they didn’t make those, you know, cause sometimes they didn’t like transcripts that cemeteries, that those headstones are not even legible anymore.
Alice Childs (41m 25s):
Yeah. I think that the WPA inventories are really valuable. So be sure and go look at those because they’re easily accessible, you know, it’s right on ancestry and you can look at that.
Diana (41m 36s):
Well, that just makes me think that the WPA inventories also let us know what churches were there at the time. You know, if they are maybe been established after the county history was written in the 1880s or nineties, it gives us a clue to what church was there and the something else that we could go search. So well, this has just been a fabulous episode. Alice learning all about probate and church records. And I think everyone will get so much out of it. So thank you so much for writing the blog post and then sharing it all in this podcast. I hope everyone will have a great week.
Diana (42m 18s):
Thanks.
Alice Childs (42m 19s):
Thank you. I’ll see you later.
Nicole (42m 20s):
Bye everybody.
Diana (42m 21s):
Bye-bye
Nicole (43m 0s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.
Links
Part 7: Pennsylvania Germans: Church Records – by Alice Childs, AG – https://familylocket.com/part-7-pennsylvania-germans-church-records/
Part 6: Pennsylvania Germans: Probate Records – by Alice Childs, AG – https://familylocket.com/part-6-pennsylvania-germans-probate-records/
Research Like a Pro Resources
Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com – https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d
Research Like a Pro eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/
RLP Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/
Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources
Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist’s Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin – https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx
Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/
RLP with DNA Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/
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