Genealogy + Names Research

Genealogically significant Quaker records (births, deaths, and marriages) are not maintained at the very local level, but rather by what was known as the "monthly meeting." 

Friends were (and are) members of a monthly meeting, but before the 20th century that generally was distinct from the group of members who met for worship during the week across a number of meeting houses. Worship meetings would happen close to where they lived (often these bodies were identified formally as a "Preparative Meeting") and then members either traveled themselves or sent representatives to the monthly business meeting, held sometimes in a central location and sometimes in rotation around the local meeting houses. The area under the care of a specific monthly meeting was not limited by state or municipal lines and could be quite large.  Monthly meetings are affiliated with yearly meetings, but over time those affiliations may have changed.

While there is no comprehensive name index of Quakers, there are online resources. Ancesty.com has scanned our Quaker records from Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia.

• Using your own Ancestry account, log in and then use this link to visit the Quaker records portal where your search will be limited to Quaker records.
• If you are on campus at Swarthmore, use this link for free on-site access to the Quaker records portal.

You may search records directly by state, county, and meeting using the right panel on the page. We've noticed some mislabeling and errors in Ancestry's databases, so feel free to contact us with a specific question if you can't find what you are looking for or suspect a volume may be misidentified on Ancestry.

The records of New York and New England Yearly Meetings are not online, but there is an online name index for New York Yearly Meeting created by our friend Jim Hazard.

Some of the words that Quakers used in their records are unique to Friends and can be confusing. Interpreting Quaker dates before 1752 can also be difficult. Please consult our Friendly Glossary and guide to the Quaker Calendar for help.

For more information, see our TriCollege Library Research Guide for help getting started with genealogy research, Quaker genealogy research and using Ancestry.com

QuakerMeetings.com, created by Thomas C. Hill (1946-2021), is an invaluable site that includes historical information about every monthly meeting, former name(s), parent bodies, names of subordinates, location, dates of establishment, yearly meeting affiliations through history, etc. If you know the name of the meeting house for instance, but are unsure about the monthly meeting to which it belongs, you can enter a general search term or you can also search by state.