Adams, Berks & Lancaster Counties, Pennsylvania 1729-1881 Church Records

This data set contains information on almost 180,000 individuals mentioned in abstracts of baptisms, births, marriages, and deaths from the registers of more than fifty Pennsylvania churches.

Church records are among the best sources for information on births, marriages, and deaths for the period of time before widespread civil registration of vital statistics. The type of information you'll find in an abstract includes the name of every person listed in the record, their relationship to the key person, role in the event, residence, date and place of event, and volume and page number of the original record. The information was extracted from microfilm records of transcriptions of the original records (printed copies of the transcriptions are available at the Family History Library).

You can learn a great deal of valuable information about your Pennsylvania ancestors from this data set. Your search results will primarily offer you the following information:

Name — The first line provides an individual's given name and surname, as well as any titles that were included in the original index. You may have difficulty locating some names for the following reasons:

• Some given names have been abbreviated. For example, "Robert" may appear as "Robt," and "Elizabeth" as "Eliz."
• Some given names are misspelled, contain typos, or may be spelled unusually.
• Some given and middle names are truncated. Specifically this happens when the name, including the spaces between the given name, middle name, and last name, is longer than twenty-three characters. For example, "McCormack, Annabelle Margaret" would be listed as "McCormack, Annabelle Mar." If you are unable to locate a particular given name and surname, try switching the given name to an initial, abbreviation, or possible misspelling. If the surname is not common, you may want to search only on the surname.

Date — The date on which the event (baptism, birth, marriage, or death) was recorded.

Event — The event in which the individual participated (for example, birth, baptism, marriage or death).

Record ID — This identification number will help you link individuals together. All individuals with the same "Record ID" number were participants in the same birth, baptism, marriage, or death.

Relation — The individual's role in the event described (for example, "mother," "father," "sponsor," "communicant").

Location — Information on location of event, usually city and state.

Church — The name of the church where this event took place.