Pennsylvania Genealogy

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Pennsylvania Genealogy Research Guide

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Pennsylvania Genealogy Research Guide

Quick Facts

Pennsylvania was one of the original thirteen colonies and became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, on December 12, 1787. It began as a proprietary colony granted by King Charles II to William Penn in 1681 and settled from 1682, and Penn's promise of religious liberty drew Quakers, German sectarians, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, and many others whose churches and communities left unusually rich records. Because civil registration came late and custody is overwhelmingly local, Pennsylvania is a deeply rewarding but county-driven state in which to trace a family.

• Capital: Harrisburg. The seat of government moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster in 1799 and to Harrisburg in 1812.
• Statehood: December 12, 1787, the second state to ratify the Constitution, grown from William Penn's royal charter of 1681 and settlement beginning in 1682.
• Counties: 67. The three original counties — Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester — were created by Penn in 1682; the last, Lackawanna, was formed in 1878, the only Pennsylvania county created after the Civil War.
• Land type: Pennsylvania is a state-land state, not a federal (public-domain) state. Title flowed from the Penn family and later the Commonwealth through a sequence of application, warrant, survey, and patent, so there are no federal General Land Office records for Pennsylvania — the original grants are documented at the state level and later transfers at the county level.
• Nickname and motto: the Keystone State; the state motto is "Virtue, Liberty and Independence."
• Where records live: most genealogical records — deeds, probate, marriages from 1885, and county birth and death registers of 1893–1905 — are kept at the county level, while statewide birth and death records begin in 1906, and the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh kept their own death records before the state took over.

Libraries and Archives

Pennsylvania's collections cluster in Harrisburg, which holds state-government records; in Philadelphia, which holds municipal, colonial, and ethnic records; and in Pittsburgh, the center for western Pennsylvania. County courthouses, public libraries, and local and religious historical societies hold material for their own areas. The principal Pennsylvania repositories include:

• Pennsylvania State Archives (Harrisburg) — the Commonwealth's records: original land warrants, surveys and patents, the septennial census, tax lists, colonial and state court records, military service records, and statewide vital records after they pass into the public domain.
• State Library of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg) — published genealogies, local histories, newspapers, city directories, and the published Pennsylvania Archives series.
• Philadelphia City Archives (Department of Records) — the city's early birth, marriage, and death records, Board of Health returns, and municipal, court, and almshouse records.
• Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) — one of the nation's great manuscript repositories, holding family papers, church and cemetery records, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society papers, and the ethnic collections of the former Balch Institute.
• Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania (GSP) — the statewide society, whose transcribed church, cemetery, and family records are a major finding aid.
• Free Library of Philadelphia — a large genealogy and local-history collection, city directories, and digital collections.
• Senator John Heinz History Center (Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania) and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh — the leading resources for western Pennsylvania families.
• National Archives at Philadelphia — federal court, naturalization, passenger-arrival, and military records for Pennsylvania.
• Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College and the Quaker collections at Haverford College — the great archives of Pennsylvania Quakerism.
• Moravian Archives (Bethlehem), the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, the Presbyterian Historical Society (Philadelphia), and the German Society of Pennsylvania — key repositories for the state's German and other religious communities.
• The FamilySearch Library and its worldwide centers hold extensive Pennsylvania microfilm and digital collections, and county courthouses (Register of Wills, Clerk of the Orphans' Court, Recorder of Deeds, and Prothonotary) hold the county records themselves.

Major Websites

These sites host digitized Pennsylvania records and indexes. Subscription sites are marked ($).

• FamilySearch — free; the backbone finding aid, with the FamilySearch Wiki, catalog, and large digitized collections of Pennsylvania vital, land, probate, court, and church records, plus a Full-Text Search that reads many unindexed deeds, wills, and land papers.
• Ancestry ($) — extensive Pennsylvania vital, census, naturalization, land, tax, and military collections, including the digitized records of the Pennsylvania State Archives.
• MyHeritage ($) — Pennsylvania vital records, censuses, and immigration collections.
• Fold3 ($) — military records, and the complete published Pennsylvania Archives series.
• Findmypast ($) — Historical Society of Pennsylvania church, cemetery, and vital collections.
• Pennsylvania State Archives online resources — free; scanned warrant registers and township maps, birth and death indexes, and the military card file.
• The published Pennsylvania Archives — free; the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page links free copies of the entire multi-volume set, a foundational source for colonial, Revolutionary, land, tax, and church records.
• Chronicling America — free; the Library of Congress archive of digitized Pennsylvania newspapers.
• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — free; digitized Pennsylvania histories, published record abstracts, and law books.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves — free; cemetery listings, photographs, and transcriptions.

Pennsylvania residents have a distinct advantage: the Pennsylvania State Archives partners with Ancestry to digitize its holdings, and residents may search those collections — including the state death and birth certificates, land warrants, septennial census, tax lists, and Civil War muster rolls — free of charge through the Ancestry.com Pennsylvania portal by entering a Pennsylvania zip code on the Historical and Museum Commission's website.

Law and Government

Pennsylvania's laws and published records explain the jurisdictions and customs that produced its genealogical records, and the foundational texts are digitized and free to read.

• The Pennsylvania Archives — a set of well over one hundred volumes, comprising the Colonial Records together with nine numbered series issued between 1838 and 1935. It is the single most important printed source for early Pennsylvania: the Second Series includes marriage records, oaths of allegiance, church registers, and Revolutionary muster rolls; the Third Series gathers land and tax records; and the Fifth and Sixth Series contain military rolls. Free copies of every volume are linked from the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page.
• The Colonial Records — the Minutes of the Provincial Council, the Council of Safety, and the Supreme Executive Council, 1683 to 1790 — are digitized on the Internet Archive and Google Books.
• The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania, the Laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the colonial and provincial laws are on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust; these record name changes, legitimations, divorces, and other acts that touch individual families.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

Statewide civil registration of births and deaths began on January 1, 1906, under the Pennsylvania Department of Health, with reliable compliance within about a decade. Before 1906 the picture is patchy: many counties recorded deaths in the short-lived experiment of 1852–1854 under the Register of Wills, and most counties again registered births and deaths from 1893 to 1906. Immigrants and other groups are often under-recorded in these early years.

Marriages are a county matter. A statewide marriage-license requirement took effect on October 1, 1885, after which the Clerk of the Orphans' Court in each county issued and recorded licenses; earlier marriages must be sought in church registers, published abstracts, and the Pennsylvania Archives.

Access rules. Under Pennsylvania law a birth certificate is restricted for 105 years and a death certificate for 50 years; older records pass to the Pennsylvania State Archives, while more recent ones are ordered, for a fee, from the Division of Vital Records of the Department of Health. New index years are opened annually as records age into the public domain. Use these online indexes and collections to find a record, then order or view the certificate:

• Deaths (statewide, from 1906): Pennsylvania Death Certificates, 1906–1972 ($), with the Pennsylvania Death Index, 1906–1964 ($) on MyHeritage; the Pennsylvania State Archives also hosts a free death index on its research site.
• Births (statewide, from 1906): Pennsylvania Birth Certificates, 1906–1917 ($), with a companion free birth index at the Pennsylvania State Archives.
• Marriages (county, from 1885): Pennsylvania County Marriage Records, 1845–1963 ($) is a statewide index; images of the original licenses are browsable free by county through the FamilySearch catalog and are held by the county Clerk of the Orphans' Court.
• Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Philadelphia's Board of Health recorded deaths and burials from 1803 and births from 1860, well before the state system; the Philadelphia Death Certificates Index, 1803–1915 ($) covers this material, held at the Philadelphia City Archives. Pittsburgh (Allegheny County) likewise kept city death records from about 1870 to 1905.

History and Timeline of Major Events

Key dates that shaped Pennsylvania's jurisdictions and records:

• 1638 — Swedish colonists found New Sweden on the Delaware, the first European settlement in the region.
• 1655 — The Dutch of New Netherland absorb New Sweden; England takes the whole Delaware Valley in 1664.
• 1681–1682 — William Penn receives his charter and founds Pennsylvania, laying out Philadelphia and creating the three original counties of Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester.
• 1737 — The Walking Purchase strips the Lenape (Delaware) of roughly 1.2 million acres in the Lehigh and Delaware valleys.
• 1754–1763 — The French and Indian War is fought across the Pennsylvania frontier.
• 1763–1767 — Mason and Dixon survey the boundary with Maryland, fixing the famous line.
• 1769–1799 — The Yankee-Pennamite conflict pits Connecticut settlers against Pennsylvania over the Wyoming Valley, arising from overlapping colonial charters.
• December 12, 1787 — Pennsylvania ratifies the U.S. Constitution as the second state.
• 1792 — Pennsylvania buys the Erie Triangle, about 200,000 acres, gaining its Lake Erie shoreline and the port of Erie.
• 1799 and 1812 — The capital moves from Philadelphia to Lancaster, then to Harrisburg.
• 1820s–1850s — The Main Line of Public Works, the Pennsylvania Canal, and then the Pennsylvania Railroad open the interior and drive migration and industry.
• Later 1800s — Anthracite coal and steel draw waves of Italian, Polish, and other Eastern European immigrants to the mining and mill regions.
• 1878 — Lackawanna, the sixty-seventh and last county, is formed from Luzerne.

Census Records and Substitutes

Federal censuses were taken every ten years from 1790 through 1950, and Pennsylvania appears in all of them; the 1790 census survives, while the 1890 census was almost entirely destroyed nationally. They are free on FamilySearch and are also searchable on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($).

The septennial census. Pennsylvania did not take regular population censuses, but from 1779 to 1863 it enumerated taxable inhabitants every seven years to apportion the state legislature. These "septennial" counts are a distinctive Pennsylvania resource, though only a portion survive. What they record changed over time:

• Basic content: for each taxable person, the township, the name, and usually the occupation, distinguishing landholding "taxables," non-landholding single "freemen," and, in some years, married "inmates."
• From 1800: the enumerations also list enslaved people, generally by name, age, and residence, and sometimes the owner — making the surviving returns an important source for early African American research.
• Later additions: an 1821 law required listing people who were deaf, and an 1836 law those who were blind, so scattered later returns add these details.
• Survival by year: returns exist for only a few counties in 1779, more in 1786, and a minority in 1793; the 1800 enumeration is by far the most complete and the richest for its slave lists; the returns for 1807, 1814, 1821, 1828, 1835, 1842, 1849, and 1863 survive only in fragments for particular counties.

The originals are held at the Pennsylvania State Archives among the records of the General Assembly, and the surviving returns are indexed in Pennsylvania Septennial Census, 1779–1863 ($); some are also printed in the Pennsylvania Archives series. Where censuses are missing, city directories (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh directories reach back to the 1780s and 1810s), the 1798 U.S. Direct Tax, and county tax lists are the best substitutes for placing a family in a given year.

Church Records

Because civil registration is late, church records are the single most important substitute for vital records before 1906, and Pennsylvania's religious variety is unusually broad. The earliest and most useful bodies are the Quakers (Society of Friends), whose monthly-meeting minutes record births, marriages, deaths, removals, and disownments; the German Lutheran, German Reformed, and Moravian churches; the plain communities of Mennonites, Amish, Brethren, and Schwenkfelders; the Presbyterians; and the Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches.

• U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681–1935 ($) — the most efficient route to Pennsylvania Friends' records, digitized from the collections at Haverford and Swarthmore colleges.
• German church registers are held by the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, and the congregations themselves, and hundreds of digitized registers can be located by county and town through the FamilySearch catalog.
• Presbyterian records are at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, the oldest denominational archive in the country.
• The Depression-era Works Progress Administration survey of Pennsylvania church records, and many transcribed registers from the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, are searchable among the Pennsylvania collections on Ancestry and at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Court Records

Pennsylvania's county courts reach well beyond lawsuits into estates, guardianships, naturalizations, and roads, and knowing which office created which record is the key to finding it. The main offices a researcher encounters are:

• Register of Wills — proves wills and grants letters of administration (probate).
• Orphans' Court — oversees the distribution of estates and the guardianship of minors, and from 1885 the county Clerk of the Orphans' Court issued marriage licenses.
• Court of Common Pleas — the main civil court, handling lawsuits, divorces, name changes, and many naturalizations; its clerk is the Prothonotary.
• Quarter Sessions — criminal matters, tavern and road petitions, and some naturalizations.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Courts of Common Pleas were established by the Judiciary Act of 1722, and earlier records are sparse. State-level and colonial court records are held at the Pennsylvania State Archives, and many are microfilmed and free on FamilySearch.

Ethnic/Minority Records

Pennsylvania has been diverse since its founding, and knowing where a group settled points to the records most likely to document a family.

• Pennsylvania Germans. The "Pennsylvania Dutch" settled heavily in the southeast — Lancaster, Berks, Lehigh, Montgomery, and neighboring counties — and their church and land records are central to research there. The German Society of Pennsylvania supports this work.
• Quakers and English. The founding population of the southeast, in Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, and Delaware counties, documented through Friends' meeting records.
• Scots-Irish. Presbyterian settlers who pushed onto the central and western frontier in the 1700s.
• Welsh. Early settlers of the "Welsh Tract" west of Philadelphia.
• African Americans. People of African descent have lived in Pennsylvania since the colonial period; the state's 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery was among the earliest such laws in the new nation. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania document manumissions and indentures, and the Philadelphia African American Census, 1847 ($) records the city's free Black households.
• Indigenous peoples. The Lenape (Delaware) of the east and the Susquehannock of the Susquehanna Valley, whose lands were conveyed through the colonial treaty purchases documented in the Pennsylvania Archives.
• Later immigrants. Italian, Polish, and other Eastern European communities in the anthracite and steel regions of the northeast and west; the former Balch Institute collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania are a leading resource for these groups.

Immigration and Naturalization

The Port of Philadelphia was a principal gateway to colonial and nineteenth-century America. Colonial German arrivals of 1727 to 1808 are famously documented in Strassburger and Hinke's Pennsylvania German Pioneers, drawn from the ships' lists and oaths taken at Philadelphia.

• Pennsylvania Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists, 1798–1962 ($) indexes the passenger lists of ships arriving at Philadelphia; the underlying federal manifests are also free on FamilySearch and held by the National Archives.
• Naturalization. Before 1906 any court of record — federal, state, county, or local — could naturalize, so the records are scattered; after 1906 the process was federalized. A key finding aid is Pennsylvania Naturalization Records from Supreme and District Courts, 1794–1908 ($). FamilySearch offers free county and Eastern District naturalization indexes, and the National Archives at Philadelphia holds the federal naturalizations for the eastern and middle districts of the state.

Land Records

As a state-land state, Pennsylvania granted land itself rather than through the federal government, so there are no General Land Office records. A first grant followed a fixed sequence: an application located the land; a warrant ordered a survey and named the "warrantee"; a deputy surveyor made the survey and filed a return; and the Penns or the Commonwealth issued the final patent. Later transfers between individuals are recorded as deeds at the county Recorder of Deeds, so the warrantee, the patentee, and the eventual settler are often three different people.

Where the records are kept.

• County level: deeds and mortgages are recorded by the Recorder of Deeds; most historical county deed books are browsable free on FamilySearch.
• Pennsylvania State Archives: the original applications, warrants, surveys, and patents are held in the Land Office records at the State Archives, whose scanned Warrant Registers — arranged by county, then surname, then date — are the essential free index and cover most of the land transferred into private ownership.

The large tracts and land programs. Knowing which program or company an ancestor's land fell under tells you where the settlement records survive.

• Depreciation Lands: tracts west of the Allegheny River (present Beaver, Butler, Allegheny, Armstrong, and Lawrence counties) sold to redeem the depreciated-pay certificates of Revolutionary soldiers of the Pennsylvania Line.
• Donation Lands: just to the north, granted free to Pennsylvania Line officers and men who served to the end of the war; the claims and maps are printed in the Pennsylvania Archives.
• Holland Land Company: a syndicate of Amsterdam investors, headquartered in Philadelphia, that bought large tracts in the northwest.
• Pennsylvania Population Company: a speculative company, tied to John Nicholson, that promoted settlement in the northwest.
• Connecticut (Susquehanna Company) claims: the overlapping Connecticut settlement of the Wyoming Valley that produced the Yankee-Pennamite conflict; its papers form a distinct series at the State Archives.
• Proprietary manors: the reserved estates of the Penn family, mapped in the published archives.

Online, Pennsylvania Land Warrants and Applications, 1733–1952 ($) provides a searchable index with images of the original warrants, and FamilySearch hosts browsable Patent Books and applications for warrants as well as a Full-Text Search that reads many unindexed patents and deeds by every name they contain.

Military Records

Pennsylvania took part in every American conflict, and Pennsylvania sent some 360,000 men to the Civil War, the second-largest number of any Northern state. Much of the early material is in the published Pennsylvania Archives.

• Colonial and French and Indian War: provincial muster rolls appear in the Fifth Series of the Pennsylvania Archives.
• Revolutionary War: the Pennsylvania Line, the associators, and the militia are documented in the Second, Fifth, and Sixth Series — including the volumes titled Pennsylvania in the War of the Revolution — and federal service records are on FamilySearch and Fold3.
• War of 1812 and Mexican War: Pennsylvania militia muster rolls are printed in the Second and Sixth Series.
• Civil War: Samuel P. Bates's History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–5 (five volumes, free on the Internet Archive) is the standard regimental reference, and its fifth volume covers the United States Colored Troops raised in the state. The Pennsylvania Civil War Muster Rolls, 1860–1869 ($) and the Veterans' Card File derived from Bates round out the state records.
• Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II: the Pennsylvania State Archives holds service and compensation files, several of which are searchable on Ancestry.

Probate Records

Probate — wills, administrations of intestate estates, and guardianships of minors — is among the richest sources for family relationships, and in Pennsylvania it is a county matter with a clear division of labor.

• The Register of Wills in each county proves wills and grants letters of administration; wills are copied into indexed will books, and the estate papers — petition, inventory, bonds, and accounts — are filed in the packet.
• The Orphans' Court oversees the settlement and distribution of estates and the appointment of guardians, keeping its own dockets and record books.

Online, Pennsylvania Wills and Probate Records, 1683–1993 ($) is name-searchable with images across most counties, and FamilySearch hosts browsable Pennsylvania probate images by county together with a Full-Text Search that reads many unindexed wills and estate files.

Tax Records

Tax lists place a family in a specific township and year and are valuable substitutes where censuses or deeds are missing; several consecutive years can reveal when a young man came of age, moved, or died and left heirs.

• Pennsylvania Tax and Exoneration, 1768–1801 ($) — provincial and early state tax and exoneration lists for a broad set of counties, drawn from the records of the Comptroller General at the State Archives.
• Colonial and provincial tax lists, including the proprietary, supply, and state taxes of Chester, Bucks, and Philadelphia, are printed in the Third Series of the Pennsylvania Archives.
• The septennial census returns (see above) are themselves tax-based enumerations and serve as tax lists for their years.
• The 1798 U.S. Direct Tax and the federal IRS assessment lists of 1862–1874 (the Civil War income and excise taxes) are on Ancestry, FamilySearch, and Fold3.

Much of the provincial and state tax material is held at the Pennsylvania State Archives, with county tax records also surviving at county courthouses and, later, with county and township officials.