Using the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies

What the 1926 church census recorded about each congregation and how to find your ancestor's church



The 1926 Census of Religious Bodies was a count of churches, not people. The U.S. Census Bureau mailed a form, called a schedule, to each congregation in the country and asked it to report its membership, property, and leadership. It is the only one of these church censuses whose original schedules survive, so it can show you the church your ancestor may have attended and sometimes the name of the pastor who served it.


Note that the 1926 schedules do not list members by name. The names you are most likely to find are the pastor and the person who filled out the form, often the church clerk.


What the Census of Religious Bodies Was


The Census Bureau collected some information about churches as part of the population census starting in 1850. When Congress made the Census Bureau a permanent office in 1902, it also authorized a separate census of "religious bodies" every 10 years. These were taken in 1906, 1916, 1926, and 1936. A 1946 count was started but never finished because of a lack of funding.


The Bureau got the names and addresses of congregations from denominational officers and gathered most of the information by mail. The published reports for each year give only totals by denomination, state, and city. The individual schedules from 1906, 1916, and 1936 were not kept, but about 232,000 schedules from the 1926 census survive at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The Bureau sorted them into more than 200 denominations.


Possible Information Found in the 1926 Schedules


  • name of the church
  • denomination
  • state, county, and city or town
  • street address, in many cases
  • number of members, divided by sex
  • value of the church building and other property
  • yearly expenses, such as spending on buildings and missions
  • Sunday school information
  • name of the pastor and any assistant pastors
  • whether the pastor attended college or a theological school
  • other churches the pastor served
  • name of the person who filled out the form
  • date the Census Bureau received the schedule


Using the 1926 Census for Genealogy Research


The most practical use of this census is finding out which churches existed in your ancestor's town around 1926. Church records are filed by congregation, so you usually need the name and denomination of the church before you can search for baptisms, marriages, or burials. Sometimes the 1926 schedules list a small church that was too new or too short-lived to appear in a county history.


Say your ancestor John Smith lived in a small town in 1930, and his obituary mentions only that he was "a lifelong member of the Methodist church." The 1926 schedules for that county may show 2 Methodist congregations in or near the town, each with its own name, denomination, and pastor. You can then look for the records of each congregation, check which pastor's name matches the one on John's marriage record, and narrow the search to the right church.


The census can also help in other ways:


  • Identify the pastor: if your ancestor was a minister, the schedule may give his or her name and education.
  • Find the denomination: the Bureau's denomination name can tell you which church body to contact for older records, since some congregations changed their names or merged.
  • Place the church: the street address can help you find the church on a city directory listing or a fire insurance map.
  • See the size of the congregation: the membership count shows whether it was a small rural church or a large city parish.


Limitations of the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies


  • Church members are counted, not named, so this census will not prove that your ancestor belonged to a particular church.
  • Some congregations did not return a schedule, and some groups did not fit the Bureau's idea of a congregation, so not every church was counted.
  • The information was reported by the church itself, and membership numbers were sometimes estimates.
  • Schedules from the other census years do not survive, so you cannot follow a congregation from one count to the next using the original forms.


Where to Find the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies


We have a transcription of the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies on our site. To find it, go to our church records directory, choose the state, and then choose the county where your ancestor lived. The congregations from the 1926 census are listed on each county's church records page. Note that this transcription was created with the help of AI, so it may contain some errors in names, places, or numbers. If something looks wrong or you need more detail, check the original schedule.


Images of the original 1926 schedules are online at the American Religious Ecologies project from George Mason University. You can browse the schedules by county to find each congregation and view the image of the form it filled out. Keep in mind that county boundaries may have changed over time so you need to look in the records for the county that existed at the time your ancestor was living there.



Need help finding more records? We have genealogy research services available. You can also try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1.3 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.


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