Indiana County Church and Cemetery Records

See Also Research In State Church & Cemetery Records - Church records rank among the most promising of genealogical records available. Indeed, for periods before the advent of civil registration of vital statistics (a very late development in many American states), church records rank as the best available sources for information on specific vital events: birth, marriage, and death. They are also among the most under-used major records in American genealogy. Part of the reason lies in the number of denominations-there are hundreds of them. Identifying and locating the records of these various churches makes even professional genealogists hesitate......

Churches - Although there was a Jesuit priest in Vincennes by 1749, the Catholic religion in Indiana declined in the late 1700s. Catholics in Vincennes and Fort Wayne were reorganized in the 1830s, and Irish and German immigrants added to the religion's numbers in the mid-1800s.

However, it was Protestantism that conformed to and enhanced the frontier existence of Indiana. The predominant denominations were Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians. A large group of Quakers migrated to the Whitewater Valley from North Carolina. German settlement areas were often Lutheran, but German-Americans established the United Brethren churches in Indiana. The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) was created in the state in the early 1800s. By the mid-1800s, there were significant numbers of Jewish families in Indiana, most of them in the larger cities.

Of the predominant Protestant body, the Methodist denomination was the largest. The circuit rider, bringing religion to the scattered pioneers in their log cabins, and the camp meeting, with its religious fervor and social aspect, were precisely appropriate to that time and place.

Baptist records are found at Franklin College (in Franklin); Methodist at DePauw University (in Greencastle); Mennonite at Goshen College (in Goshen); Presbyterian at Hanover College (in Hanover); Disciples of Christ at their historical society in Nashville, Tennessee; and French Catholic at Vincennes University in the Byron R. Lewis Collection. There are also Catholic church histories and records at the Catholic Archives, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. Quaker records are at Earlham College (at Richmond)

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Cemeteries - The commissioner's office of each Indiana county may have burial records for soldiers, sailors, and marines. If available, the records should include name, age, date of enlistment, discharge date, and death date. Records begin about 1862.

The Indiana State Library holds records of inscriptions from some Indiana cemeteries. The "Indiana Cemetery Locator File," compiled by the Genealogy Division, is an alphabetical listing of cemeteries, indicating the location in the state and the designation in the Genealogy Division of the Indiana State Library where inscriptions may be found.

In the 1940s, the American Legion and the Indiana Adjutant General's Office were responsible for the "Veteran's Grave Registration File." The State Archives hold the original card file; it has been duplicated on thirteen microfilm reels. Included are soldiers buried in Indiana who fought in wars prior to and including World War I, and it includes fifty-one of the ninety-two counties.

Cemetery records and gravestone inscriptions are a rich source of information for family historians. Cemetery and other sources of information associated with death include:

FOR DEFINITIONS OF ALL CEMETERY TERMS SEE THE GENEALOGY ENCYCLOPEDIA
  • Biographical works
  • Burial permits
  • Church burial registers
  • Cemetery records (often several different kinds are kept)
  • Cemetery indexes (often compiled by genealogical societies)
  • Cemetery sextons’ records
  • Cemetery deed and plot registers
  • Death certificates
  • Death indexes
  • Family bibles
  • Family burial plots
  • Funeral director’s records
  • Grave opening orders
  • Gravestone (monument) inscriptions
  • Military records
  • Monuments and memorials
  • Necrologies
  • Newspaper death notices
  • Obituaries
  • Probate records
  • Published death records
  • Religious records
  • Transcriptions of cemetery inscriptions
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