Where to Find Clues to Your Ancestors' Faith or Religious Affiliation

By Mary Beth Newbill | Southern History Department, Central Library 

While church records make excellent resources for genealogists, the first step in the process is knowing where to find them. This article and short video will discuss how to use sources, some of which you may already have, to help you determine your ancestors' religious affiliation or church membership.

Local newspapers are filled with articles about the churches in their area. Don’t overlook them as a resource when it comes to researching church membership. Articles were often written describing various committee meetings, reporting on the latest election of church officers, or giving a brief history of a church as it celebrates a milestone anniversary. Of course, wedding announcements and obituaries have long been places to look for clues to religious affiliation. The location of a wedding or funeral is often the place where the family worshipped. Thankfully, researching newspapers online is getting much easier. Sources like Newspapers.com and Chronicling America are going a long way toward making them more accessible.

Printed sources like biographical dictionaries, local histories, and family histories can all include information about churches and their members. Books like the Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists in Alabama: Their Leaders and Their Work and the Biographic Etchings of Ministers and Laymen of the Georgia Conferences contain valuable information about early church leaders and their congregations.

City directories can be useful for giving you an idea of how many churches were located in a community at a particular point in time. If you know where your ancestors lived and you know a little something about their faith tradition, you can determine where they might have worshipped. You can also use city directories if you have a marriage license that is signed by a minister but do not know which church he served. By looking up the minister in a city directory of the same year (or within a year or two) of the wedding, you will know which church he was associated with.

Lastly, a person’s death certificate often lists their place of burial. While many people are buried in large municipal cemeteries, there are also countless small cemeteries attached to churches. If you do not have access to a family member’s death certificate, the website http://www.findagrave.com is an amazing tool for locating someone’s place of burial.

By determining our ancestors’ faith tradition, we add another layer to our knowledge of them and their lives. Not only will knowing about their church membership deepen our understanding, it may lead us to additional records. Church records can be very helpful once our research takes us back to a time before vital records are widely available.