Family History Information

Baptist church and denominational records are usually not very helpful to family historians and genealogists. This is particularly true for information on Baptist church members and ministers.

Where to look:
If you are seeking information on Baptist churches, members or ministers, the state Baptist historical collections can usually be more helpful than the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. See the Links page for information.

Not Available: Lists of members of local churches
The congregational records we hold are indexed only by the name of the local church, not by the names of its members.

Not Available: List of individual Baptists
There is no national, state, association, or county membership list of individual Baptists. Membership in Baptist churches is recorded only by the local church. Birth, baptism, marriage, or death records, are not included in Baptist church records. Church membership records usually show when the individual joined the church and how they were received. They sometimes will show how they left the church (moved, death, expelled, etc.) and when. If you do not already know the name of the church to which your ancestor belonged, we have no way of determining that for you. If you know the name of the church to which your ancestor belonged and if the records of that church have been deposited here, at best, we could find only that your ancestor had belonged to a given church at a given time. While the collection includes over 1500 church records, this comprises only a small percentage of Southern Baptist churches in the United States.

Possibly Available:
If your ancestor played a prominent role in Baptist life at a statewide or, more likely, a national level, there is a chance we might find an obituary (probably very brief) in one of the Baptist periodicals that we hold. If your ancestor served as a Southern Baptist foreign missionary there is a good chance that the collection has some biographical information and usually some correspondence files as well. Unfortunately, this is not true of missionaries who served with the Home Mission Board.

Search requests. For general family history information requests about prominent Southern Baptist leaders, the staff will check several basic sources. If this search does not locate any information, then the search is ended and the requester notified. The more specific the request, the more likely information can be located. The minimum charge for a search that results in any sent (letter, fax or email) information is $10.