My Trails into the Past

Many years ago, when I first started genealogy research, I wrote a letter to St. John the Baptist Church in Joliet asking if they had a marriage record for my great-grandfather, John (Johan) Hork to Julia Sievert in 1872. I knew that my grandfather, William Cyril Hork, was Catholic and hoped they were married in the church. What I had for the marriage date and place was from an Illinois marriage index. Images of records weren’t online yet. I also asked about any baptisms held there for any of their children. What I got back was a taped-together page of a two-page spread from the church book. They married in 1872 and were listed on line number 9. [1] Because this was a German Catholic Church, I got more than the groom and bride’s names and the date of the marriage. I also got their parent's names and the places they came from. But I did not get the column headings and had to guess what they were. Fortunately, the priest did not write in the Fractur script, so I was able to read i...

Church records are always a nice resource to document events in a family’s life. Sacramental records such as baptisms, marriages, and funerals have always been a go-to resource for family genealogists. These supplement civil registration or even substitute for them when these events occur before the advent of civil registration. There are other records to be found in church records. Churches kept minutes of their meetings and an ancestor might be mentioned in them, especially if they were part of the governing group. Records of receiving communion or entry into the full church membership through confirmation are other records that often can be found. One of the best records found especially in Swedish-American churches are the membership records. My husband’s families were members of both the Swedish Lutheran and the Swedish Covenant churches. Both churches kept records of their memberships. From these records, you can learn when they joined the church and when they left, if they...