I have a number of Lithuanian immigrant relatives who settled in Baltimore, and I am also a leader in a Facebook-based group that is adding Lithuanian emigrants to Geni using information from census, naturalization, civil vital, and Catholic Church record datasets.
Catholic Church records for Baltimore and surrounding areas in the Archdiocese are available at the Catholic Heritage Archive.
Naturalizations in particular give you much of the information you need to find the Catholic Church records. Here is an example that I'll use in this post:
Joseph Budelis and his wife Magdalen were married in Sugar Notch, Pennsylvania, but their five children were all born in Baltimore. Here is what I did to find the available baptism records.
First, a little background: The first Lithuanian Roman Catholic parish in Baltimore was St. John the Baptist, established in 1888. The congregation worshiped in three different buildings until 1917, when the Archbishop of Baltimore transferred the historic St. Alphonsus Liguori Catholic Church, a former German parish established in 1845, to the Lithuanian parish.
The Catholic Heritage Archive is a partnership of the Archdioceses of Baltimore and Philadelphia with Findmypast. The records are freely available for anyone to view - you don't have to have a paid account with Findmypast. You do, however, need to use (or set up) a free account with Findmypast to access the records.
That free Findmypast account also gives you the ability to use Findmypast to search -and sometimes that works. You *can* see the search results, and you *can* view images of the records (but not their transcriptions) even without a paid account. However, I am a firm believer in providing links to ALL possible sources, so I will be writing about two ways to find the records - especially since searching using just Findmypast does not always work.
Here's an example of a search I did for the Budelis children in the Baptisms record set. First, I searched for the last name Budelis, checking the box for "Include name variants." There were no relevant results. Then I tried a wild card search, last name "Bud*" - no need to check the box with that search.
There were 142 results, with a promising one on the fourth page. Magdalenam is a Latin variant of Magdalen, the birth and baptism years were 1917, the church was St. Alphonsus Liguori, and the father's first name was Josephi, a Latin variant of Joseph. So I clicked on the icon to view the image. It's at the bottom of page 319 of one of the baptism registers. The mother's first name and the date of birth match up. Note also that her record includes some information about her marriage:
I wasn't having any luck finding her brothers using the Findmypast search. So I decided to switch directly to the records at the Archdiocese of Baltimore link on the Catholic Heritage Archive - because Findmypast wouldn't let me maneuver to other pages in the record set, and that is what I needed to do next.
Once you go to the link in the paragraph above, you need to choose a parish. If a search in FindMyPast indicated a particular parish, go to that one. If you are looking without doing a FindMyPast search first, you'll want to start with the parish with the most Lithuanians.
You don't want to chose St. John the Baptist records. You will get the records for a St. John the Baptist parish (primarily Italian) that took over the Lithuanians' third location before they moved into St. Alphonsus and adopted that name.
You don't want to chose St. John the Baptist records. You will get the records for a St. John the Baptist parish (primarily Italian) that took over the Lithuanians' third location before they moved into St. Alphonsus and adopted that name.
So choose St. Alphonsus Liguori - but be aware that the older records for the German congregation are mixed in with the Lithuanian parish records. There are 20 record sets for this church - nine of which contain baptisms - and many have overlapping dates.
I have determined that the following record sets pertain to the Lithuanian parish:
Event Type Image Count Year Range*
Baptisms 166 1894-1907
Baptisms 219 1907-1919
Baptisms & Marriages** 70 1890-1893
Burials 52 1895-1958
Marriages*** 151 1891-1920
Marriages*** 147 1894-1920
* The year range includes the index, which includes records that have not yet been digitized and/or released.
** Most of the records in this set are in Lithuanian, handwritten, and very hard to read (except for some baptisms at the end). There are also lists of parishioners.
*** These two record sets are near duplicates of each other. The internal handwritten index is more thorough in the one with the 151-page count, so I would try that one first.
Another clue that you've got the right book is that the first page of most (not all) of them identifies it as "formerly St. John the Baptist" and/or "Lithuanian Parish" and looks similar to this:
This particular record set, Baptisms 1907-1919, should include the first three children of Joseph and Magdalen Budelis. There's an internal handwritten index, so I scrolled to the two pages of Bs, which were on images 3 and 4 out of 219 total.
Sure enough, it had Magdalena indexed under Budkeviciu, but it also had her brothers Joseph and Leonard:
Note that the last name for Joseph was originally spelled Butkevicius, and later as Boudelis - that's why he didn't come up in my searches on Findmypast. Here is Joseph on page 259 of the baptism form book, the second one on the page - note that the date of birth, May 6, 1915, matches that on his father's naturalization petition:
Leonard's baptism record is currently not available. The index says it's on page 373, but the records online only go through page 371 - so close!
And here is a link to Magdalena's baptism record in the Catholic Heritage Archive. Please, when you are entering data in sites like Geni, include ALL the possible sources to view the original record.
If Magdalena's brothers had not been in the index? Then I would have scrolled to pages with baptisms after the dates of birth listed in the naturalization, and found them that way. Internal handwritten indexes - if they even exist - are often not complete, so don't assume a baptism (or marriage, or death/burial) isn't in a register just because the name is not in the internal index.
I have found records for other Lithuanian emigrants in Baltimore in other parishes - this is where the search function in Findmypast is helpful.
Great post. I have Slovak and Croatian ancestors so familiar with the trials of Catholic records!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Nancy, and thanks for commenting!
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