User:Hanna5974/sandbox/australia church

For information about records for non-Christian religions in Australia, go to the Religious Records page.

The Value of Church Records in Australia Family History

 * Church records are a valuable source for proving the dates and places of births, marriages, and deaths and the identity and relationships of family members.
 * They are particularly important prior to the start of each stategovernmentkeeping birth, marriage, and death certificates.

Prepare by Collecting Background Information
You will possibly find many different people with the same name as your ancestor, especially when a family stayed in a locality for several generations, and several children were named after the grandparents or aunts and uncles. Be prepared to find the correct church records by gathering in advance as many of these exact details about the ancestor as possible:
 * name, including middle name and maiden name
 * names of all spouses, including middle and maiden name
 * exact or closely estimated dates of birth, marriage, and death
 * names and approximate birthdates of children
 * all known places of residence
 * occupations
 * military service details

Carefully evaluate the church records you find to make sure you have really found records for your ancestor and not just a "near match". If one or more of the details do not line up, be careful about accepting the entry as your ancestor. There are guiding principles for deciding how to resolve discrepancies between records that are seemingly close. For more instruction in evaluating evidence, read the Wiki article, Evaluate the Evidence.

Where Did Your Ancestors Worship?
Knowing the denomination of your ancestor is an important part of church records research. Start by learning how to search a variety of records for clues to the denomination, locality, and possibly even the specific names of churches where your ancestors worshipped. Follow the tips in the Wiki article, Determining the Church Your Ancestor Attended. Although this article was written for United States research, the same tips hold true for Australia.

Where to Find Church Records in Australia
Some church records will be digitized and available online. Others may be deposited in
 * state, college, or ecclesiastical archives;
 * with historical or genealogical societies;
 * local libraries; or
 * still at the local church itself.

Civil Registration and Church Records

 * From 1788 to 1856 the only birth, death or marriage records kept in Australia were the registers maintained by the established churches. As registrar's offices assumed responsibility for registration, they requested copies of earlier church records to incorporate into their collections.

Searching for Church Records by Denomination
The links below for each denomination will take you to a Wiki articles with: 
 * Lists of online record collections
 * Descriptions of typical records for that denomination
 * Directories for addresses and instructions for writing to local ministers
 * Addresses for denomination archives, with
 * collection descriptions,
 * notes on services available,
 * finding aids, and
 * search engine links.

Searching for Church Records by State or Territory
These links will take you to Wiki articles for each state or territory, where you will find:
 * Lists of online record collections
 * Contact information, website links, collection descriptions, and services available for state, university, society, and local church archives within the state'''
 * A brief history of major religions in the state
 * Instructions and links to the FamilySearch Library catalog to search by locality for records

Writing to Local Churches
The Anglican Church of Australia Directory
 * If you know the name of the church or parish, use the search tool.
 * To find a list of parish addresses, hover over the "Dioceses" option in the menu and select a diocese. From the diocese page, select "Parishes" in the content outline.

Historical Background

 * The Anglican Church of Australia, formerly known as the Church of England in Australia, is a Christian church in Australia and an autonomous church of the Anglican Communion.
 * Australian society was predominantly Anglo-Celtic, with 40% of the population being Anglican. It remained the largest Christian denomination until the 1986 census.
 * When the First Fleet was sent to New South Wales in 1787, Richard Johnson of the Church of England was licensed as chaplain to the fleet and the settlement.
 * In early Colonial times, the Church of England clergy worked closely with the governors. Richard Johnson, a chaplain, was charged by the governor, Arthur Phillip, with improving "public morality" in the colony, but he was also heavily involved in health and education.
 * Authorities were suspicious of Roman Catholicism for the first three decades of settlement and Roman Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Anglicans.
 * The Church Act of 1836 established legal equality for Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists.
 * The Australian Constitution of 1901 provided for freedom of religion.

Writing to Local Churches

 * ACC Find a Church

Historical Background

 * The Australian Christian Churches (ACC) is a network of Pentecostal churches in Australia affiliated with the World Assemblies of God Fellowship (AOG or AG), which is the largest pentecostal denomination.
 * In Australia, in 2007, the ACC had more than 375,000 adherents with more than 1,100 congregations across the country.
 * The ACC grew out of the Assemblies of God in Australia, which was founded in 1937 with the merger of Assemblies of God Queensland (AGQ) and the Pentecostal Church of Australia.
 * In 2007 it assumed Australian Christian Churches as its public name but remained the incorporated Assemblies of God in Australia until 2008.

Historical Background

 * Australian Baptist Ministries (formerly Baptist Union of Australia) is the oldest and largest national cooperative body of Baptists in Australia. The Baptist Union of Australia was inaugurated on 24 August 1926 at the Burton Street Church in Sydney. It is affiliated with the Baptist World Alliance.
 * Baptist work in Australia began in Sydney in 1831, forty-three years after the British penal colony was established.
 * The first preacher was John McKaeg, who conducted the first Baptist service on Sunday 24 April in The Rose and Crown Inn on the corner of Castlereagh and King Streets.
 * It was not until 1835 that the first church was established in Hobart Town by Henry Dowling,[3] a strict Calvinist. *John Saunders, who had been sent by the Baptist Missionary Society of England to Sydney in 1834, raised the funding to erect a second church which was opened on 23 September 1836.
 * The first state Union was formed in Victoria in 1862.
 * The national Baptist Union was founded in 1926 by representatives from existing state unions.
 * According to a denomination census released in 2020, it claimed 1,021 churches and 76,046 members.
 * State ministries are named:
 * Baptist Churches Western Australia
 * Baptist Union of Victoria
 * Tasmanian Baptists
 * Baptist Churches South Australia
 * Queensland Baptists
 * Baptist Association New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory
 * Baptist Union of the Northern Territory

Historical Background

 * The Catholic Church in Australia is part of the worldwide Catholic Church under the spiritual and administrative leadership of the Holy See. From origins as a suppressed, mainly Irish minority in early colonial times, the church has grown to be the largest Christian denomination in Australia, with a culturally diverse membership of around 5,439,268 people, representing about 23% of the overall population of Australia according to the 2016 census.
 * The permanent presence of Catholicism in Australia came rather with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788. One-tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic, and at least half of them were born in Ireland.A small proportion of British marines were also Catholic. Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland, so the authorities were suspicious of Catholicism for the first three decades of settlement.
 * Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Anglicans.
 * The absence of a Catholic mission in Australia before 1818 reflected the legal disabilities of Catholics in Britain and the difficult position of Ireland within the British Empire.
 * The Church Act of 1836 established legal equality for Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists.
 * Establishing themselves first at Sevenhill, in the newly established colony of South Australia in 1848, the Jesuits were the first religious order of priests to enter and establish houses in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory – Austrian Jesuits established themselves in the south and north and Irish in the east.
 * The goldrush saw an increase in the population and prosperity of the colonies. When gold was discovered in late 1851, there were an estimated 9,000 Catholics in the Colony of Victoria, increasing to 100,000 by the time the Jesuits arrived 14 years later.
 * While Austrian priests traversed the Outback on horseback to found missions and schools, the Irish priests arrived in the east in 1860.
 * Until about 1950, the Catholic Church in Australia was overwhelmingly Irish in its ethos. Most Catholics were descendants of Irish immigrants and the church was mostly led by Irish-born priests and bishops.
 * The Catholic Church also became involved in mission work among the Aboriginal people of Australia during the 19th century as Europeans came to control much of the continent.
 * From 1950 the ethnic composition of the church began to change, with the arrival of Eastern European Displaced Persons from 1948 and more than one million Catholics from countries such as Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia and Hungary, and later Filipinos, Vietnamese, Lebanese and Poles around the 1980s. There are now also strong Chinese, Korean and Latin American Catholic communities.

Historical Background

 * The Congregational Union of Australia was a Congregational denomination in Australia that stemmed from the Congregational Church in England as settlers migrated from there to Australia.
 * Congregational Churches existed in all states and territories of Australia at some time. The oldest Congregational Church was founded in Hobart in 1830 by Frederick Miller.
 * The Union dissolved in 1977 when the Uniting Church in Australia was formed. 260 of the congregations that had previously formed the Union joined the new Uniting Church. The Uniting Church union also included the Methodist Church of Australasia and the Presbyterian Church of Australia.
 * However, 40 other congregations that had previously formed the Union objected to joining the new Uniting Church and formed the Fellowship of Congregational Churches instead.
 * In 1995, there was a split within that Fellowship, with some more ecumenically-minded congregations leaving to form the Congregational Federation of Australia.

Historical Background

 * The Methodist Church of Australasia was a Methodist denomination based in Australia.
 * On 1 January 1902, five Methodist denominations in Australia – the Wesleyan Methodist Church, the Primitive Methodists, the Bible Christian Church, the United Methodist Free and the Methodist New Connexion Churches came together to found a new church. In polity it largely followed the Wesleyan Methodist Church.
 * The church ceased to exist in 1977, when most of its congregations joined with the many congregations of the Congregational Union of Australia and the Presbyterian Church of Australia to form the Uniting Church in Australia.
 * There are still independent Methodist congregations in Australia, including congregations formed or impacted by Tongan immigrants.
 * The Wesleyan Methodist Church of Australia is derived from the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America and did not join the Uniting Church in Australia.

Historical Background

 * Presbyterian Christianity came to Australia with the arrival of members from a number of Presbyterian denominations in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century. The Presbyterian missionaries played an important role to spread the faith in Australia. Since then Presbyterianism grew to the fourth largest Christian faith in the country.
 * The Presbyterian Church of Australia was formed when Presbyterian churches from various Australian states federated in 1901. The churches that formed the Presbyterian Church of Australia were the Presbyterian Churches of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia. These state churches were (and still are) incorporated by separate Acts of Parliament.
 * In 1977. two-thirds of the Presbyterian Church of Australia, together with nearly all the membership of the Congregational Union of Australia and the Methodist Church of Australasia, joined to form the Uniting Church in Australia. The current iteration of the PCA is made up of the one-third of 1977 churches that did not join.
 * The Presbyterian Church of Australia's official website has stated that the church has over 50,000 adults and children within 740 congregations with more than 600 ministers, deaconesses and theological students. At the last Commonwealth Census (2016) nearly 540,000 people identified as Presbyterian/Reformed, representing 2.3% of the population. This makes Presbyterianism Australia's fifth largest Christian denomination, although not all Presbyterians are members of the Presbyterian Church of Australia.
 * See also List of Presbyterian and Reformed denominations in Australia for various independent Presbyterian churches not affiliated with the PCA or the Uniting Church.

Historical Background

 * Andrew Anderson, who arrived with his family in 1842 organized a small branch of the LDS Church with 11 members near Wellington, New South Wales.
 * Official LDS missionary work did not begin until Americans John Murdock and Charles W. Wandell established a mission in Sydney on 31 October 1851. By the end of 1852, there were 47 members of the LDS Church.
 * In 1852, Maitland and Melbourne areas were opened for proselyting.
 * Despite the growth of the church in Australia, numbers of its members in the country dwindled because the early LDS Church encouraged emigration to the United States.
 * From the 1860s until 1898, church leaders in Utah gave Australia little attention and missionary work was not contiguous. There were three or four operating branches in Australia between 1879 and 1898.
 * By 1898, there were around 200 members in Australia and 21 missionaries in 1900. Because the LDS Church began encouraging church members to stay in their homelands rather than emigrate, church membership from 1910 to 1925 doubled from 600 to 1,169.
 * By 1923, the LDS Church was officially declared a "religious denomination" in Australia.
 * From 1926 to 1951, church membership increased from 1,169 to 2,187.

Writing to Local Churches
Lutheran Archives 27 Fourth Street Bowden SA 5007 Australia E-mail: lutheran.archives@lca.org.au Telephone: 08 8340 4009
 * Lutheran Archives
 * Genealogy and Family Research: The parish registers contain information on births, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, deaths and burials of people who were associated with the Lutheran Church. These are extremely valuable for family history research. To assist researchers a Church Records Computer Database Index has been prepared. A printout of the surname provides the researcher with an index to entries with that surname in the parish registers. This enables the researcher to quickly locate those records which may be useful. There is an additional charge for this service.
 * Computer printout of surnames in church records database: $5 per surname searched, plus $1 per page
 * Transcription of church register records: $6 per record (e.g. baptism record)

Historical Background

 * The first Lutherans to come to Australia in any significant number were the immigrants from Prussia, who arrived in 1838 with Pastor August Kavel. This period in Prussia was marked by a persecution of "Old Lutherans" who refused to join the Prussian Union under King Frederick Wilhelm.
 * In 1841, a second wave of Prussian immigrants started, with the arrival of Pastor Gotthard Fritzsche. He settled with the migrants in his group in Lobethal and Bethanien (now Bethany) in South Australia. The Lutheran church of this period is referred to as the Kavel-Fritzsche Synod.
 * A split occurred within the South Australian Lutheran community in 1846, and two separate synods were established. The followers of Kavel founded the Langmeil-Light Pass Synod, and those of Fritzsche the Bethany-Lobethal Synod.
 * These two groups came eventually to be named the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Australia, which derived from the Bethany-Lobethal Synod, and the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Australia which was of the Langmeil-Light Pass Synod, and a number of other synods that had developed. These two denominations joined to form the Lutheran Church of Australia in 1966.
 * A significant influx occurred after World War II and migration also brought a number of Lutherans from other European countries.
 * As of 2009, the church had 320 parishes, 540 congregations and 70,000 baptised members in Australia and 1,130 baptized members in New Zealand.

Archives
There are six Synods in Australia:
 * New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory
 * Northern Synod
 * Queensland
 * South Australia
 * Victoria and Tasmania: Synod Archives
 * Western Australia

Historical Background

 * The UCA is Australia's third-largest Christian denomination, behind the Catholic and the Anglican Churches. The Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) was founded on 22 June 1977, when these churches united:
 * most congregations of the Methodist Church of Australasia,
 * about two-thirds of the Presbyterian Church of Australia and
 * almost all the churches of the Congregational Union of Australia.


 * According to the church, it had 243,000 members in 2018. In the 2016 census, about 870,200 Australians identified with the church; in the 2011 census, the figure was 1,065,796.
 * There are around 2,000 UCA congregations.

Historical Background

 * The beginnings of the current Wesleyan Methodist Church in Australia may be traced to 1945, when the Rev. Dr. Kingsley Ridgway offered himself as a Melbourne based "field representative" for a possible Australian branch of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America, after meeting an American serviceman who was a member of that denomination.
 * It was never a part of the merger negotiations that formed the Uniting Church.
 * The Wesleyan Methodist Church of Australia saw increased growth by the 1980s, particularly in Queensland.
 * There are 54 congregations currently listed on the denominational website.

Information Recorded in Church Records
The information recorded in church or parish registers varies somewhat from religion to religion, and later records generally give more complete information than earlier ones. Most church registers for the Anglican, Catholic, and Presbyterian denominations provide the following information:

Baptisms

 * Birth and baptism dates
 * Place of baptism
 * Christian name of the child
 * Christian and surname of the father
 * Christian name of the mother (some include maiden surname)
 * Parents’ abode
 * Occupation of the father
 * Name of the officiating minister

Children were generally baptized within a few days of birth. If a child died soon after birth, death information was sometimes added as a note.

Marriages

 * Date and place of marriage
 * Full names of the bride and groom
 * Parish of residence of the bride and groom
 * Marital status of the bride and groom prior to this marriage
 * Married by banns or license
 * In the case of a minor, whether with consent of parents
 * Name of the officiating minister
 * Signatures or marks of the bride and groom
 * Signatures or marks of witnesses

Marriage registers may also include other information about the bride and groom such as their ages, occupations, and names of parents. In cases of second and later marriages for a woman, they may include her former married names along with her maiden name.

Marriage registers sometimes include the published banns. These were announcements of intent to marry which were made for two or three Sundays prior to the marriage, and gave an opportunity for anyone to come forward who knew of any reason why the couple should not be married.

Burials

 * Dates of death and burial
 * Place of burial
 * Name of the deceased
 * Place of abode at time of death
 * Age of the deceased
 * Occupation of the deceased
 * Name of the officiating minister

Occasionally parents' names, cause of death, and even the date and place of birth are given for the deceased. Burials were recorded in the records of the church where the person was buried. The burial usually took place within a few days of death. Burial records exist for individuals for whom no birth or marriage record exists. In addition, stillbirths may have been recorded in a burial register when no baptism occurred.