Philadelphia Congregations Early Records

Featured Congregation/Collection

Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, PA

Holy Trinity parish was formed in 1788 at the initiative of German-speaking Catholics who wanted a separate place for worship. Once established, it was the first ethnic parish in the United States. The movement for a separate congregation began when the Germans bought a purchased their own burial ground in 1768. They would also begin keeping separate registers in 1784. The German Catholic Society was organized in 1787 to acquire land for a church as well as for the maintaining of a school.…

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).