Quaker Records: Meetings, Certificates and Disownments
Quakers kept some of the most detailed records in early America. How their meetings were organized, what their minutes and registers contain, and where to find them.
If you have ancestors from colonial Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, New England or the Ohio Valley, there's a good chance some were members of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers. Quaker records are among the best in early American genealogy: they recorded births, marriages and deaths carefully, tracked members as they moved, and kept detailed minutes of members' conduct.
How Quaker meetings were organized
- Monthly meetings were the basic unit for business and record keeping. Most genealogical records come from monthly meetings.
- Quarterly meetings grouped several monthly meetings.
- Yearly meetings covered a large region, such as Philadelphia, New England, Baltimore, North Carolina or Ohio Yearly Meeting.
- Monthly meetings often had separate men's and women's meetings, each keeping its own minutes. Women's minutes are an excellent source for women's lives.
What Quaker records contain
Registers
Most meetings kept registers of members' births, marriages and deaths, often with exact dates and parents' names, decades before civil registration.
Marriage certificates
Quaker marriages took place in a meeting for worship. The certificate was signed by the couple and by many witnesses, often listed in order of relationship, with family members first. The witness list can identify parents, siblings and in-laws.
Minutes
Monthly meeting minutes record the business of the meeting, including:
- Marriage intentions, announced at two meetings before the wedding
- Certificates of removal: when members moved, their meeting issued a certificate to their new meeting. Following these certificates lets you trace a family's migration, meeting by meeting.
- Disownments: members who broke the rules were "disowned," or removed from membership. Common reasons included "marrying out of unity" (marrying a non-Quaker, or marrying without the meeting's approval), military service, drinking and debt.
- Acknowledgments: a member could "condemn" their own misconduct and be restored to membership.
- Requests for membership from people joining.
Disownments, while hard to read, are valuable: a disownment for "marrying out of unity" tells you a marriage took place and roughly when, even if the marriage itself was recorded elsewhere.
Quaker dates
Quakers used numbers instead of names for days and months, such as "11th day of 2nd month 1745." Before 1752, the first month was March. See Old Dates for how to convert them.
Where to find Quaker records
- Hinshaw's Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, a multivolume set of abstracts of records from many monthly meetings in several regions. It's a great starting point, but abstracts can contain errors, so check the originals.
- Ancestry's collection of U.S. Quaker meeting records, with images of original minutes and registers from many meetings.
- Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College and Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College, both in Pennsylvania, which hold the records of many yearly meetings.
- Other Quaker repositories, including collections at Guilford College (North Carolina), Earlham College (Indiana) and elsewhere, for their regions.
- FamilySearch, which has filmed many meeting records.
Research tips
- Find the right monthly meeting. Identify which meeting served the area where your family lived, and check neighboring meetings too.
- Read both men's and women's minutes.
- Follow the certificates to trace migrations, such as from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to Ohio and Indiana, a common Quaker route.
- Watch for "late" Quakers: after a disownment, a family may disappear from Quaker records but appear in other churches' records or civil records.
- Remember Quaker beliefs when interpreting other records. Quakers often refused to take oaths (they "affirmed" instead), to serve in the military, or to pay war taxes, which shows up in court and tax records.