Travel to Where Your Ancestors Worshipped (Virtually)

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The pandemic has affected every part of our lives, including how people are able to attend religious services. Many people are attending virtual religious services on the web. That means that many places of worship are uploading videos of religious services to the web.

This may be a way that you can attend a religious service where your ancestors worshipped! The services might be hosted on a variety of websites for video services. They might be found on YouTube, Vimeo, or Facebook.

Use Google, or your other favorite search engine, to locate the place of worship that your ancestors attended. You may know the place, or may find it on marriage or other records of events. If you are still unsure, a Google search around their residence may shed light on possibilities. When you visit the homepage for the place, there should be a link to services, or other information leading to how worship is being shared.

It is worth learning some of the history of this place of worship. You may find that it has been renovated since your ancestors worshipped there. It may also be that parts of building were preserved and have remained unchanged.

Last week, I attended Mass at St. Mary’s Church in Newport, RI. This is where my great-great-grandparents were married, where their children were baptized and where their funeral Masses and that of their oldest child were held. It is also where John F. Kennedy wed Jaqueline Bouvier. Being able to virtual attend a Mass there was a virtual trip to a place that is definitely a future destination. The homepage for St. Mary’s has a link to where you can view “Mass Online at St. Mary’s.”

Book Review: “How To Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records”

I was excited at the opportunity to review “How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records: A Genealogist’s Guide” by Sunny Jane Morton and Harold A. Henderson, CG. The book contains specific resources for researching ancestors in major Christian Denominations before 1900 in the United States. That excitement lasted throughout the whole book.

While censuses are great for providing us with a backbone of an individual’s or family’s timeline, Church records can help us learn the web of connections between family members and those who were close to them. The choice of Church may also give us the underlying motivations for major stories in our ancestors’ history. At the very least they provide us knowledge of the important institution and tenets with which our ancestors allied themselves.

This book is a game changer for religious research. Up until now, genealogists may have or may not have known the importance of church records, but conquering them was a hit-or-miss effort. These skills were usually taught by an experienced genealogist. A genealogist would learn a little about whom to contact and what to ask for, and that could still be a hit-or-miss effort. Experience was the only teacher.

In Section 1, Chapters 1 through 5 take the genealogist through the basics of researching Church Records. Section 2 addresses specific Christian denominations in the United States: Anglican/Episcopal, Baptist, Congregational, Dutch Reformed/Reformed Church in America, Latter-Day Saint (Mormon), Lutheran, Mennonite and Amish, Methodist, Quaker (Religious Society of Friends), Presbyterian and Roman Catholic. Each chapter contains a short history of the religion, important facts about it, followed by information about the records and how to find them. Every chapter also includes a section with resources for learning more.

One unexpected hidden gem in this book is that this approach may prove useful for those researching enslaved African-American ancestors. Some church records for them may exist in the Anglican/Episcopal Church, covered in Chapter 6.

I read this book from cover-to-cover, impressed by the amount of research put into each topic. The authors were clearly focused on putting useful and actionable information into genealogists’ hands. The authors are knowledgeable researchers, but put forth the additional effort of having experts in each religion review their material.

If you are thinking about trying to find your Christian ancestors in Church records, and you should be, this book is for you. This is an invaluable reference for those researching Christian Churches in the United States.

“How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records: A Genealogist’s Guide” by Sunny Jane Morton and Harold A. Henderson, CG, is available from the Genealogical Publishing Company.