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PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS

Digitizing the Records 
of Philadelphia’s Historic 
Congregations
Walter R. Rice, Jr.
Carol W. Smith, Christ Church Preservation Trust

ABSTR AC T In 2018, the Council on Library and Information 
Resources (CLIR), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 
awarded a Digitizing Hidden Collections project grant to Christ 
Church Preservation Trust to digitize the records of eleven of Phila-
delphia’s historic congregations. Founded by William Penn in 1681 
upon the principle of religious liberty, Philadelphia drew worship-
pers of all denominations. By 1750, the Society of Friends, Christ 
Church, First Presbyterian, Gloria Dei, Mikveh Israel, and others 
were providing spiritual inspiration to their various congregations. 
Their records reflect an emerging society, providing a glimpse into 
political and social changes before much other official record keep-
ing was in place. These largely hidden records allow access to histor-
ical data of great use to scholars, students, and family historians. It 
is a collaborative project with resources shared generously by the 
congregations and their partners in this initiative: the Athenaeum of 
Philadelphia, Atla, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Four years ago, the idea of scanning and placing online in one unified 
website the records of some of Philadelphia’s oldest congregations 
pushed us into an exciting and rewarding venture. Along the way, 
we’ve acquired strong partners, willing congregations, and dozens of 
volunteers who have all come together to make this dream a reality. 



Papers and Presentations  11

In 2016, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), 
awarded a Digitizing Hidden Collections project grant for the scan-
ning of New England’s Congregational church records. That project 
led to our impetus to bring together the records of Philadelphia’s 
diverse religious communities, offering an even broader array of 
theology and religious traditions. These “hidden records” would 
allow current and future generations of researchers to envision life 
in 18th- and early 19th-century Philadelphia through the minutes 
of the various trustee bodies; the baptismal, circumcision, marriage 
and burial records; the accounting records; sermons; and more. We 
hoped to find not only the histories of the individual congregations 
but the shared history of Philadelphians as they faced epidemics, 
revolutions, depressions and a civil war.

Digitizing the Records of Philadelphia’s Historic Congregations is 
a project that has been in the works for the last two and a half years. 
It brings together the records of eleven of Philadelphia’s historic 
congregations, ranging in date from 1708–1870.  Participating 
congregations include the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, 
Christ Church, First Baptist Church, First Presbyterian Church, Gloria 
Dei, Mikveh Israel, Second Presbyterian Church, St. George’s United 
Methodist Church, Saint Paul’s Episcopal, St. Peter’s Episcopal, and 
Third Presbyterian Church. 

The records are being scanned, uploaded to one unified website 
(www.philadelphiacongregations.org), then shared with the public 
through that website and through Atla’s digital library (dl.atla.com/
collections/philadelphia-congregations-early-records-project).  
Records can also be viewed through the University of Pennsylvania’s 
Special Collections Libraries’ OPenn portal (openn.library.upenn.
edu/html/congregations_contents.html). It is through OPenn that 
long-term digital preservation is ensured.

The project built upon an earlier pilot initiative undertaken at 
Christ Church in 2012, when the Athenaeum of Philadelphia scanned 
the first three volumes of the Christ Church vestry minutes. Walter 
Rice, our IT consultant, built software to allow for transcription to 
be done online and to have it viewed alongside the original record. 
These were uploaded to the Philadelphia Geohistory website; links 
from the Christ Church website took researchers directly to these 
records. Also included in this project was an access database of 
baptismal, marriage, and burial records from 1709 through 1900, 
allowing searches for individuals, dates, and life events. The contin-

http://www.philadelphiacongregations.org
http://dl.atla.com/collections/philadelphia-congregations-early-records-project
http://dl.atla.com/collections/philadelphia-congregations-early-records-project
http://openn.library.upenn.edu/html/congregations_contents.html
http://openn.library.upenn.edu/html/congregations_contents.html


12  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

ued demand from researchers for copies of those original records 
led to a search for funding that would make the scanning and plac-
ing online of those records possible. CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Collec-
tions project grants provided a viable option. Over the years, we 
had developed strong relationships with many of the archivists and 
volunteers working with the records of the older congregations in 
Philadelphia; it was easy to reach out and invite them to join us in 
this project.

The goal was to scan those records created by congregations 
established in the historic city of Philadelphia prior to 1800. Records 
of high interest were vestry minutes, sacramental registers, account-
ing records, charters, and more. Our dates spanned the years from 
the beginning of the congregation through 1865.

Nine different congregations ultimately agreed to take part; others 
wished to but were under contract with Ancestry or their records 
were held by a collecting institution that did not wish to join. We 
submitted our application in 2016 and were rejected, but heartened 
by the comments we received. We spent the ensuing year figuring 
out ways to strengthen our proposal. We learned of Atla’s new digi-
tal library and decided to use it as our digital portal. This would 
widely expand our audience reach. We reached out to the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania’s Special Collections Libraries and asked them 

FIGURE 1: Sexton’s Account Book, St. Peter’s Burial Ground, 1789–93, pp. 43–4. Used 
by permission of Christ Church. www.philadelphiacongregations.org/records/items/
show/280.

http://www.philadelphiacongregations.org/records/items/show/280
http://www.philadelphiacongregations.org/records/items/show/280


Papers and Presentations  13

if they would provide the long-term preservation of our images and 
they willingly agreed to join our venture. Finally, we strengthened 
our proposal by adding two more congregations—the African Epis-
copal Church of St. Thomas and the First Baptist Church—and we 
expanded our date range to 1871 to cover the period of the assassi-
nation of Octavius Catto, the well know African American teacher, 
baseball player, abolitionist, and vestryman of St. Thomas’s. We had 
talked with digital archivists and gotten feedback, inviting them to 
join a technical advisory committee. We resubmitted our proposal 
and, in November of 2017, received word we had received a grant 
of $385,000. Work began in January of 2018 and it’s been an excit-
ing journey of discovery. Volunteers or staff from the congregations 
took their records to the Athenaeum to be scanned. Carly Sewell, 
our metadata archivist, provided checks, metadata, numbering, and 
generally kept track of images, and Walter Rice created an Omeka-
based website for us to use as we built the project. Our website went 
live in April of 2019, and we notified interested groups such as the 
Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania that it was available.

The records chosen for scanning were wide-ranging: trustee 
and vestry minutes; baptismal, circumcision, marriage and burial 
records; accounting records; sermons; and more. They provide list-
ings of names of those who helped to shape their congregations and 
the city of Philadelphia, as well as the “hidden” stories of their times. 
Through the sexton’s account records (see figure 1), we see the names 
of the Native American chiefs who died of smallpox on their visit with 
President Washington in 1793 and the impact of the American Revo-
lution on these various congregations told through their minutes. 
They are a treasure trove for genealogists but equally important for 
those interested in religious, social, and political history.  

We worked hard to leverage key partnerships to create an ambi-
tious yet successful project. The content partners provide amazing 
historical information that is unavailable anywhere else. Penn and 
Atla provide long-term stability and wide dissemination. But with-
out the participation of a key middle-size institution, the Athenaeum 
of Philadelphia, the project would not have been possible. From the 
perspective of the small archives partners, the technology and infra-
structure necessary for the project is beyond their capacity to create, 
let alone maintain. Archives staff are often part-time or volunteer, 
with limited capacity for projects. From the perspective of our large 
partners, the project is in many ways too small to get their attention, 
but their participation is key to ensuring the viability of the endeavor. 



14  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

Utilizing existing relationships with small institutions like Christ 
Church and large institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, 
the Athenaeum connects small and large partners by providing a 
sophisticated digital infrastructure and digitization center that could 
cater to the specific needs of the congregations while, at the same 
time, providing the human networking connections, a community 
gathering place, and the standards-based technology to make part-
nership with the larger institutions possible and to their benefit.

The collaboration between so many institutions requires adher-
ing to a set of best-practice standards. With public-facing frontends 
on the project website, the Atla Digital Library, and Penn’s OPenn 
site, a standard metadata profile and crosswalks was essential. Work-
ing with Atla, we adopted a version of the PA Digital and DPLA Dublin 
Core-based standards. For transcriptions, we adopted a modified 
version of the Library of Congress’ transcription style guide.

Limited technological resources of the congregational partners 
pushed us to develop the project using open standards and (as much 
as possible) open source software. Defining our goals in advance, we 
were able to patiently observe the development of various projects 
and carefully combine different software components to build the 
desired functionality. The project is using DCMI terms for its primary 
metadata creation, with crosswalks to TEI and EAD. Images are 
created as archive TIFF files and converted to JPEG2000 for display. 
Metadata is exchanged between systems using OAI-PMH, and image 
metadata and the images themselves are displayed using IIIF. The 
system components include Omeka, ArchivesSpace, Samvera (Atla 

FIGURE 2: Metadata workflow.



Papers and Presentations  15

Digital Library), and Universal Viewer. Figures 2 through 4 provide 
diagrams of the workflows, standards, and protocols utilized for the 
exchange of metadata, images, and transcribed text.

The project’s success owes much to our ability to re-use and extend 
existing projects and technology infrastructure. We are using the 
Athenaeum’s existing digital infrastructure, built over the last 20 
years primarily for maps and large-format architectural drawings, 
now extended to support bound book volumes, OCR’d text, and 

FIGURE 3: Images workflow.

FIGURE 4: Transcription workflow.



16  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

human transcriptions. The crowdsourced transcription functional-
ity is built using an interface designed for an earlier Christ Church 
project to transcribe early minute books. The Atla and OPenn systems 
were designed for a different genre of resources and for much larger 
datasets, but we have been able to request careful, minor changes 
to fully support the project’s resources for discovery and long-term 
preservation and access.

Outreach has been a key component of this project from the 
beginning. We’ve held public programs with scholars talking about 
their use of the records, presented the project to the broader histori-
cal community at the American Association of State and Local History 
in Philadelphia in 2019 and to smaller groups of congregational 
members and their constituents. We’ve used social media to spread 
the word about this project and to try to recruit transcribers. With 
the advent of the quarantine lockdowns, we began a concerted tran-
scription effort. We had set up the website so that transcription work 
could be done online and had done some training with our congre-
gational members and a few volunteers in the fall. This enabled us 
to refine our guidelines (based on Library of Congress standards) 
and clarify the registration process. Emails to prospective groups 
and Facebook posts brought in a dedicated crew of volunteers whom 
we try to keep united and engaged through biweekly coffee hours.

The project will need to be extended, partially because pandemic 
shutdowns have slowed scanning, but we had already anticipated 
extending it in the hopes we’d get more transcription work done. We 
are also bringing in more records as Ancestry contracts expire. As 
a result of this, we have added approximately 30,000 records of the 
Society of Friends. We are also hoping that additional grants may 
help us expand this project.

The project has already proven beneficial to researchers and 
the congregations. Archives are not the primary or even secondary 
mission of these institutions, which are reliant on volunteers for the 
most part (or someone whose job was something else altogether), so 
to have the project come this far is terrific. The advantages to the 
congregations cannot be overemphasized. By scanning these records 
and making them available online, our team can reduce the need 
for scholars or family historians to physically come in and view the 
records—something these congregations are not always set up to do.  
Our work provides them with a preservation copy of the informa-
tion and reduces physical handling of materials. Finally, by putting 



Papers and Presentations  17

this information online and putting it together in a unified database, 
more researchers will see it. In these days of COVID-19, all of us are 
more conscious of how important digital access is and how impor-
tant it is to provide access to those who cannot physically visit to see 
the records.

It is our partners who have truly made this possible: the Athe-
naeum for its high quality scanning and careful handling, the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania for providing long term preservation, and Atla 
for providing access through its digital library to a far greater audi-
ence than we could hope to reach on our own. This was an incredible 
gift from CLIR and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to researchers 
of early Philadelphia history and we could not be more grateful to 
them and to our partners.


