Death Register — Church of St. Anthony's (Lith.)
July 1959 – c. 2009
Introduction
This handwritten death register from St. Anthony's Lithuanian Catholic Church — almost certainly the Detroit-area Lithuanian parish — documents the deaths of Lithuanian diaspora parishioners from July 1959 through approximately 2009, spanning five decades of community life. Each entry records the name of the deceased, residence, age, marital status, date of death, sacraments received, officiating priest, and place and date of burial, providing an extraordinarily granular record of a mid-twentieth-century immigrant generation and their American-born descendants. As one of the few surviving sacramental registers from a Lithuanian ethnic parish in the Detroit metro area, it is an irreplaceable source for genealogical research, demographic history, and the study of Lithuanian-American Catholic community life.
Community and publication context
Community and publication setting
Context and significance
Significance
This death register is a primary document of Lithuanian-American Catholic life in Detroit across the second half of the twentieth century. It captures in handwritten form the names, ages, residences, family statuses, and burial places of hundreds of individuals — most of them immigrants or the children of immigrants who left Lithuania before, during, or after World War II. The Lithuanian surnames recorded across its pages — many still carrying Lithuanian grammatical endings, others anglicized through decades of American life — constitute a living onomastic record of a community in transition between two languages and two worlds.
Beyond genealogy, the register documents the social geography of the Lithuanian diaspora in metropolitan Detroit: addresses in working-class and later suburban neighborhoods, burial at cemeteries that served the ethnic Catholic community, and the officiating priests who maintained Lithuanian religious and cultural identity through the Cold War decades and beyond. The entries extending into the 2000s reveal a community whose founding immigrant generation had largely passed, leaving a record that bridges the era of mass Lithuanian displacement to the era of Lithuanian independence restoration. For descendants of parishioners, the register may be the only surviving official documentation of a grandparent's or great-grandparent's death and burial in America.
How this record carried memory
Institutional parish recordkeeping by a Lithuanian ethnic Catholic congregation in Detroit; preservation of Lithuanian surnames, community death records, and sacramental continuity within the diaspora.
Record connections
People, places, and institutions linked in the catalog