African American Church Records

United States

African American Genealogy

Church Records

African American Genealogy Wiki Topics
Beginning Research
Introduction Research Steps	Record Finder Search Strategies
Original Records
Bible Records Business Cemeteries Census Church Records Compiled Genealogies Court Records Freedman's Bank Freedmen's Bureau Funeral Homes Land and Property	Military Records Newspapers Obituaries Occupations Online Records Oral History Probate Records Slavery and Bondage Southern Claims Commission Taxation Vital Records
Compiled Sources
Biography	Periodicals
Background Information
History Melungeons	Migration Periodicals
Finding Aids
Archives & Libraries Family History Centers] Further Reading	Internet Sources Resources Societies

Introduction

Church records can be compared to census Slave Schedules to find and double-check for names and families. Federal Census Records before 1850 list the heads of free African American households by name, but only numbered the enslaved persons. The 1850 census was the first census to name all persons in free households. Some church records will show membership of enslaved persons before the Civil War. Such records can give vital clues to the identity of the enslaved who were not named on census records.

Historically, religious institutions have provided strength, stability, and support for their members, as well as a focal point for social interaction. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the African American community from the antebellum period to the present.

Histories of Congregations

The scope of congregational histories may vary from a few paragraphs in an anniversary bulletin to scholarly histories. In addition to a narrative history of a church's activities, these materials may contain membership and leadership rosters, biographical information about their pastors, names and life details of prominent members, and often photographs of pastors, groups, and significant events in the institution's past.

Free Blacks in the antebellum period, those years from the formation of the Union until the Civil War, were quite outspoken about the injustice of slavery. Their ability to express themselves, however, was determined by whether they lived in the North or the South. Free southern Blacks continued to live under the shadow of slavery, unable to travel or assemble as freely as those in the North. It was also more difficult for them to organize and sustain churches, schools, or fraternal orders such as the Masons.

Although their lives were circumscribed by numerous discriminatory laws even in the colonial period, freed African Americans, especially in the North, were active participants in American society. Black men enlisted as soldiers and fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Some owned land, homes, businesses, and paid taxes. In some northern cities for brief periods of time, Black property owners voted. A very small number of free Blacks were also slaveholders. The enslaved persons that most free African Americans purchased were relatives whom they later manumitted. A few free African Americans also owned slave-holding plantations in Louisiana, Virginia, and South Carolina.

Free African American Christians founded their own churches which became the hub of the economic, social, and intellectual lives of African Americans in many areas of the fledgling nation. African Americans were also outspoken in print. Freedom's Journal, the first Black-owned newspaper, appeared in 1827. This paper and other early writings by African Americans fueled the attack against slavery and racist conceptions about the intellectual inferiority of African Americans.

African Americans also engaged in achieving freedom for others, which was a complex and dangerous undertaking. Enslaved Blacks and their white sympathizers planned secret flight strategies and escape routes for runaways to make their way to freedom. Although it was neither subterranean nor a mechanized means of travel, this network of routes and hiding places was known as the "underground railroad." Some free Blacks were active "conductors" on the underground railroad while others simply harbored runaways in their homes. Free African Americans like Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, David Walker, and Prince Hall earned national reputations for themselves by writing, speaking, organizing, and agitating on behalf of their enslaved compatriots.

Thousands of freed African Americans, with the aid of interested whites, returned to Africa with the aid of the American Colonization Society and colonized what eventually became Liberia. While some African Americans chose this option, the vast majority felt themselves to be Americans and focused their efforts on achieving equality within the United States.

Baptist

• Who's Who Among the Colored Baptists of the United States, by Samuel William Bacote. New York, New York, Arno Press, 1980. FS Catalog book 973 F2swb; at various libraries (WorldCat); Online at: FamilySearch Digital Library.

African Methodist Episcopal

• The African Methodist Episcopal Church : a history, Dennis C. Dickerson, Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 2020. FS Catalog book 287.83 D558a
• History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Daniel A. Payne. Reprint of original published: Nashville Tennessee: Pub. House of the A.M.E. Sunday-School Union, c1891. New York, New York : Arno Press, 1969, FS Catalog book 973 K2pd
• History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church : being a volume supplemental to a History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, by Daniel Alexander Payne, D.D., LL.D., late one of its bishops, chronicling the principal events in the advance of the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1856 to 1922.Charles Spencer Smith, Reprint of original published: Philadelphia : D.M. Baxter, Book Concern of the A.M.E. Church, c1922, New York, New York, Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968. FS Catalog book 973 K2smc, Online at FamilySearch Digital Library.
• The bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church by Richard R. Wright, Nashville, Tennessee, A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1963, Online at FamilySearch Digital Library.

Additional Sources

• History of the African mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States : with memoirs of deceased missionaries, and notices of native customs, by E.F. Hening, New York, New York: Stanford and Swords, 1850. Online at: FamilySearch Digital Library.

External Links

• The Church in the Southern Black Community, Online at: Documenting the American South: Contains autobiographies, biographies, church documents, sermons, histories, encyclopedias, and other published materials.
• For resources available for churches in Virginia go to the African American Church Histories in the Library of Virginia.

Note: Websites specific to particular states can be found by searching on the Internet for "African American Church Records [State]."