The faith of our fathers

Search Screen - Trinity Lutheran Church, Sangamon County, Illinois

Father's Day may find you humming "Faith of our fathers, holy faith, We will be true to thee till death!"  Knowing the faith of your fathers can be very helpful in understanding their stories, as well as finding their records.  Church records can be a rich source of family information: births, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, transfers to other parishes/locations, deaths and burials.

Journal of the ... Session, Northwest Indiana
Annual Conference, the ...

 By Methodist Church (U.S.). Northwest Indiana Conference, 1909

Some denominations centralize their records, while others may be kept by individual congregations. Older records might be housed in a local public library or private archive. Church records that have been published into books (annual church directories, quarterly conference reports) may be available digitally on Google Books.

Some churches have websites that provide easy access to their records (particularly burial indexes). To find out if there are church records that might be useful to you, read the FamilySearch wiki article for the county where your ancestor lived, search the Family History Library Catalog, call the local public library reference desk, and/or try a Google search for the church (location + denomination +  church records). 

Voter Registrations

Now that we're past the dramatic focus on the elections and voters, you may want to consider the value of voter registration in a totally different way.  Voter Registration records can be a great source of birth and residence information in family history research.  

Online collections of voter registration records are available through both free and "for pay" sites, including the California, Great Registers, 1866-1910 (FamilySearch.org), Alabama 1867 Voter Registration at archives.alabama.gov and voter registration records for Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom at Ancestry.com.  The Family History Library Catalog includes more than 2,000 listings for voter records. Go to FamilySearch.org, click on Catalog, select "Subject" search and type the state where your ancestor lived plus the word "vote." (Not every location will have voter records.)

Family History Library Catalog

The Family History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City is the largest library of its kind in the world. Many of the 2.4 million rolls of microfilm and 727,000 microfiche can be ordered through a local Family History Center so you can view them without making a trip to SLC (fun as that would be!). Learning to use the FHL Catalog is critical to finding out what resources are available that might have information about your family.

The FamilySearch team has recently released brief on-line training videos that can help you learn to search the catalog quickly and effectively. To view the list of available lessons, go to the Family History Library Catalog page. You can search the catalog directly from there, or select one of the training videos to view.

Finding Prussian Ancestors

Hundreds of thousands of marriage records from 19th century Catholic and Lutheran parishes in the Poznan (Posen) region of Prussia have been indexed by volunteers and are available for you to search at The Poznan Project website.

If you find your ancestor in the index, you then have the parish and can search the Family History Library Catalog at familysearch.org for additional information available on microfilm through your local Family History Center. 

Check the status of available records indexed to date, and more are being added as additional parishes are completed. This is a database to re-check periodically. Check out www.polishroots.org and the Poland page on the FamilySearch wiki to learn more about Polish and Prussian records.