Led by the Christ Church Preservation Trust with a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and funding by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “Digitizing the Records of Philadelphia’s Historic Congregations: Providing Documentation for the Political, Social and Cultural Developments in Philadelphia” is exactly what it says. Well, okay, it could bear a bit more description than that.

A 2018 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant allowed for the archives of Philadelphia’s Christ Church Episcopal to combine with the archives of St. George’s Methodist Church, Gloria Dei [“Old Swedes’”] Church, Congregation Mikveh Israel, the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, the Episcopal Dioceses Archives, the Presbyterian Historical Society, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, and the Baptist Historical Society. More than 41,000 of their combined records, records of some of the oldest congregations in America, are being digitized and transcribed by the project. Many, if not all, of those records have already been digitized and posted online at Philadelphia Congregations Early Records, while transcription is ongoing.