Philadelphia Congregations Early Records

Featured Congregation/Collection

African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, Philadelphia, PA

The African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas was an outgrowth of the African Church of Philadelphia founded in 1792 by the Free African Society, a mutual aid organization, established in 1787 by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen for the purpose of encouraging religion, literacy, and providing destitute members – especially widows and orphans – with financial assistance. Absalom Jones led the congregation and became the first African American admitted to Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church when…

Philadelphia Congregations Early Records

When completed, the Philadelphia Congregations Early Records project will offer over 80,000 pages of records from Philadelphia’s oldest congregations, connecting the archives of Christ Church, St. George’s Methodist Church, Gloria Dei, Mikveh Israel, the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, the Presbyterian Historical Society, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Historical Society, the Moravian Archives, and Friends Historical Library.

Digitized materials include minutes, account books, birth, marriage, death, and burial registers.

This project is supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Additional support has been provided through a Historical & Archival Records Care (HARC) grant from the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission (PHMC).