Genealogy and Ancestry.com

In this section, you will learn how to navigate the U.S. Quaker Meetings 1681-1935 collection on Ancestry.com.

To access the card catalogs from the homepage, click on "Search" in the header, and then "Card Catalog," as seen below.

You can search for any genre terms you would like here, for this guide we'll use the term "quaker."

Once you have searched for "Quaker," there will be over 70 collections to chose from. To browse US Quaker meeting records, choose "U.S. Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1935."

This will lead you to a landing page where you can search or browse over 6 million Quaker records. Just like general searching in Ancestry.com, use as much information as you have. Or, to browse records, use the right sidebar. The way this is set up is a bit wonky. Although Quaker records are typically recorded in the hierarchy of Quaker meetings -- Yearly Meeting, Quarterly Meeting, Monthly Meeting -- these records are first sorted into Meeting state and then Meeting County, and all meeting records, no matter if they are Yearly or Monthly. A few pointers:

• The counties that a meetinghouse is in today, and classified in Ancestry.com may not be the original county the meetinghouse was in.
• The materials that were scanned include (up until 1935): vital records (birth, marriage, removals, death, burials), meeting minutes (both joint, men's, and women's), Meeting for Sufferings, and limited other records.
• You may want to browse through multiple counties for the meeting or records you are looking for. Some meetings are completely miscategorized, some have records under multiple counties. 
• Some titles of volumes are not correct. If you are not finding what you are looking for on the first try, click on another item to see if it is what you are searching for.
• If you do not find a record you are looking for, please contact one of the staff at one of the major Quaker repositories:
  • Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Baltimore Yearly Meeting: Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections
  • Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Baltimore Yearly Meeting, New York Yearly Meeting: Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College.
  • New England Yearly Meeting: Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
  • Ohio Yearly Meeting, Western Yearly Meeting, Indiana Yearly Meeting, and other mid-western states: Earlham College Friends Collection
  • Various North Carolina Yearly Meetings, other meetings in the south-eastern United States: Guilford College's Quaker Archives

Once you have selected an item, it will look like this:

You can read the book as if it were physically in front of you. You can raise and lower the filmstrip at the bottom by clicking the icon that looks like a piece of film. You can also jump to a specific page. The image below shows other options you may want to use.