Kirchenregister für Pennsylvania – Landkreise Adams, Berks und Lancaster, 1729-1881

Church records are among the best sources for information on vital information prior to the commencement of widespread civil registration of vital statistics. This is because churches usually kept records on the members of their congregations. Church records generally include, but are not limited to births, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, deaths, and burials.

This database contains information on almost 180,000 individuals found in the records of more than fifty early Pennsylvania churches located in Adams, Berks, and Lancaster counties. Information that may be found in this data set includes name of individual, date of event, event type, record ID, relation to principal individual in the record, location, and name of church. The information contained in this data set was extracted from transcriptions of the original church records located and available on microfilm at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Be sure to locate the original record, or at least the microfilmed transcription of the record, that corresponds to the extract that you find in this database. An extract only contains a portion of a record, and while the most genealogical significant parts (i.e. names and dates) were probably extracted, there may be other important pieces of information contained in the original record that were not included in the extract. To locate the microfilm that the transcription of the original record is found on at the Family History Library, perform a locality search in the Family History Library Catalog for the county in which the record is found. Then select the topic "Church Records" and determine which title or titles the record might be a part of. If you are not able to travel to the Family History Library or to the actual church where the original record would be located, you may be able to order the Family History Library microfilm to be sent to your local Family History Center. You may learn more about Family History Centers under the Family History Library section on the Family Search website.