Sunday, August 25, 2013

Church Record Sunday: Church Yearbooks

Think yearbooks are just for schools? There are all types of yearbooks for organizations including religious. Did your ancestor's denomination have a yearbook?

From Internet Archive


One example of church yearbooks is found on the Congregational Library, Congregational Christian Historical Society website. According to their website,



"One of the library's most frequently used reference resources is a succession of denominational yearbooks dating back to 1854. They contain lists of active ministers, necrologies (obituaries) of recently deceased ministers, church statistics, and the denominations' annual reports.  This resource is particularly useful to churches preparing for an anniversary, genealogists, and authors researching church histories."


The great part is that some of these can be found digitized on Internet Archive, Google Books and on various individual church websites. Links to digitized copies can be found on the Congregational Library's website.

Other church yearbook collections include these from the Seventh-Day Adventist Church dating back to 1883, and this example of Central Congregational Yearbooks from Kansas Memory,

2 comments:

Miriam Robbins said...

I'd just like to let your readers know that I have some church yearbooks, listed as church directories, on my Online Historical Directories site.

Gena Philibert-Ortega said...

Thanks Miriam, that's great to know. I love both your Online Historical Directories website and your Online Historical Newspapers website. A must for any researcher.

Thank you for the comment. I appreciate it!

--Gena