Your Guide to Finding Quaker Ancestors (The Religious Society of Friends) Consider yourself fortunate if you discover ancestors who were members of the Religious Society of Friends. They kept very good records, many of which have been extracted and published. Wikipedia: History of the Religious Society of Friends. Quaker.org is the official website of the Society of Friends.

General Guides * Finding and Using Quaker records * Transcripts & Abstracts * Record Repositories * Other Websites & Links*

General Guides to Researching Quaker Ancestors:

If you are new to researching Quaker ancestors, you will want to begin with a few brief articles that provide an overview.

• Finding Your Quaker Roots (very general)

Our Quaker Ancestors: Finding Them in Quaker Records by Ellen Berry and David Berry If you have ancestors who were members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), you may want to spring for this book. It costs under $20 and only covers the United States, but it serves as a good, basic reference to research. It was published in 1987, so will not contain references to the internet. You can buy if from GPC. I recommend it.

Finding and Using Quaker Records

The Religious Society of Friends kept excellent records of the many meetings. Of most importance to the genealogist are the records of the monthly meetings. You must both find the records and learn to use them.

These articles can help you get started:

• "Quaker Records" by Maureen A. Taylor|
• "Quaker Records for Genealogists" Kip Sperry
• Understanding Quaker marriages
• Take Time to Note: The 1752 Calendar Change has a paragraph that explains the specifics of Quaker dating (scroll down)
• Quaker meeting record abbreviations

And these guides can give you a more in-depth understanding

• The Mary L. Cook Public Library published a helpful guide: "Friendly Research: An Introduction to Quaker Genealogy with a List of Internet Sources." This guide focuses on Quakers in SW Ohio, but it also contains a significant amount of general material. (It is a large .pdf and takes awhile to download. You can purchase a copy )
• BYU Research Guide: Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) Genealogical and Historical Records.

You must find the meeting that has the records you seek.

• See Quaker Records by State for a listing of the meetings, supplemented by a very helpful bibliography of secondary source material.
• Quaker Meetings will let you find a meeting by locality and tell you where the records are kept.

When searching for Quaker records in the Family History Library catalog, do a place search of country or state as well as county or town. They will be found under church records. Search also under the subjects Quakers and Society of Friends.

Published transcripts and abstracts:

Hinshaw's 6 volume Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy is now available on CD .

GPC also sells an index to the 6 volume paper edition (you wouldn't need an index with the CD) ans well as reprint of each of the 6 volumes.

• vol. 1 North Carolinia
• vol. 2 New Jersey/Pennsylvania
• vol. 3 New York
• vol. 4 Ohio
• vol. 5 Ohio
• vol. 6 Virginia

This set is available at Ancestry.com.

When you first see information in Hinshaw you might thing you are reading a foreign language...
use this

• Guide to Researching Quaker Records Using Hinshaw

Hinshaw does not include the Indiana meetings, which are coved in Heiss's Abstracts of the Records of the Society of Friends in Indiana, also a 6 volume set. (find in a library)

These two sets are available in most large libraries with genealogical or historical collections.

There are other meetings not covered in Hinshaw, some published separately. These volumes cover many, but by no means all, meetings in the United States.

Major Quaker Record Repositories in the United States:

• Friends Historical Collection. Guilford College.
• Friends Historical Library. Swathmore College. -- see especially information for family historians.
• Quaker & Special Collections. Haverford College
• Friends Collection Earlham College
• Indiana Historical Society has a notable collection of material pertaining to Indiana Quakers

Other Websites

Most Helpful Website for researching your Quaker ancestors: Quaker Corner at Rootsweb. If you use Quaker records, you will need the "Glossary of Quaker Terms" published within that site. You will want to take time to explore the many resources available to you from this site and bookmark it so it will be readily available for frequent consultation.

Find more online at Cyndi's List : Quaker