St. John of God Church, Chicago

Google Street View image of the church in 2001 before it was taken down.

St. John of God Church closed in the early 1990's. Unlike other buildings that remain where they stand, the front of St. John of God was moved and reused. The stained glass windows went to Loyola University in 1995. The facade of the building was dismantled and reconstructed for the new St. Raphael the Archangel Church in Old Mill Creek. The new building uses the reconstructed interior of the closed St. Peter Canisius Church in Chicago.

As a closed parish, its records were sent to the Archdiocesan Archive. The records were imaged again and this time up to 1925 (instead of the usual 1915). In addition to "new" records (1916-1925), there is an additional copy of pre-1916 records which could be consulted if for some reason the original photography had problems. These reimaged series are identified online using the phrase "... with index" whereas those prepared from the original microfilm do not have that designation. The LDS image sequence number in the index is based on the microfilms (those described without the "... with index" phrase) for baptism volumes 1-4 and part of 5.

Births

Volume 1 of baptisms includes about 17 baptisms per page and is somewhat "dense" in the amount of information per page in that regard. It runs from July 1907 through December 1911. Perhaps because little room was left to record marriages, the baptisms were copied into two other volumes labeled as volume 2 and volume 3. One can argue they are really the same in content to volume 1, but because they are physically different books, they were labeled consecutively. The online baptism index was created from reading volumes 2 and 3 because the handwriting was easier to read (There were only 7 baptisms per page in volumes 2 and 3) than in volume 1. Once completed, content from 2 and 3 was copied and then repaginated to reflect volume 1. Other changes that stood out were made to the copy but a name-by-name comparison was not made. So, persons baptized during this time period will occur in the online index twice-- once in volume 1 and once in volume 2 or 3. In Volume 3, pages 103-105 occur BEFORE page 1.

Volume 4 of baptisms had problems with faded ink in various sections making it difficult to read some of the names. Pages in the range of about 40-50 had some numbering issues presumably because the corners where the page numbers are printed had flake off. You may need to look at other pages with the same number.

Volume 5 of baptisms in the index requires some explanation. At the time this index was first prepared, only the microfilmed images were available. The LDS image sequence number therefore refers to the series without the "... with index" phrase. This would cover records from roughly September 1914 through December 1915, Records after 1915 only occur in the series with the "... with index" phrase. As such, the LDS image sequence number is relative to that image series.

Later volumes of baptisms would be found only in those series with the phrase "... with index".

Deaths

There are three available volumes of death records. They usually only include the name and age of the deceased in addition to the dates of death and burial. Later on, the street address was included. Some of the early deaths (1907-about 1909) in volume 1 do not occur on numbered pages. You can count backwards from page 1 (0, -1, -2, etc.) to get to the correct page if browsing manually. The link in this index should otherwise bring up the correct image when you enter the LDS sequence number provided in the index. I surmise that records on these unnumbered pages were given record numbers after the fact. "Pogrzeb" probably refers to a burial as opposed to being someone's surname even though the line is numbered.