New! Early St. Louis Catholic Baptism and Marriage Records Added to the StLGS Website!

If your ancestors were in St. Louis during its earliest years, there is a good chance they were Catholic, French, Native American, and/or Black, and, if so, they were baptized or married in one of the three oldest of St. Louis’s Catholic churches: the Basilica of St. Louis IX, King of France (otherwise known as the Old Cathedral), Saints Mary and Joseph Church in what is now the Carondelet neighborhood in South St. Louis City, or St. Ferdinand de Florissant in today's North St. Louis County. If you think you had ancestors who might have been here during the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, we have another treat for you on our website! You will find revised pages for the Old Cathedral and Sts. Mary and Joseph and a brand-new page for St. Ferdinand on which you can find a multitude of additional baptisms and marriages. Read on for details!

StLGS Congregations Project News and Farewell to Another Volunteer

(Thanks to Carol Whitton, StLGS Projects Director, for contributing the first part of this week's post.)

As you may know, St. Louis Genealogical Society (StLGS) is currently working on a project to identify, index, digitize, and preserve all St. Louis City and County congregational records. We hope all congregations will choose to participate and allow StLGS to put indexes and images of their historical records on our website. Records we are scanning, digitizing, and indexing include baptisms, confirmations, marriages, deaths, and, in some cases, member lists. During the past ten years, we’ve identified about 1,700 congregations, both historical and existing, in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County. To date, we’ve completed only a tiny fraction, 112 congregations, with more than thirty more underway. Our goal is to help preserve as many records as we can and make them more readily available to family historians. To do this, however, we need more congregations to share their records, and for that, we need your help!