Philadelphia Congregations Early Records

Featured Congregation/Collection

First Moravian Church, Philadelphia, PA

In 1742, the Moravian Church began holding services in Philadelphia under the leadership of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. On New Year’s Day in 1743, 34 members organized as a Moravian congregation in a new church building in Old City, at the corner of Race and Bread Streets. In 1820, the original church building was enlarged and remodeled. In 1856, a second church building was dedicated by the congregation, on Franklin and Wood Streets. A third and final church building was dedicated in 1893…

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).