Family History (Pre-1917)

The pre-1917 Anglican Church in St Petersburg, located at 56 English Embankment, was known as the (British) Factory Church or Embassy Church or English Church (*), and later as the English Church of St Mary & All Saints, and had over 2000 on its electoral roll. Some photos of the church interior pre-1917 can be found on our Pinterest boards. Since 2017, the old English Church has been leased by the Russian state to the St Petersburg Music Hall, now renamed the Chaliapin Musical Theatre, which has carried out extensive renovations of the building (and its unique, in Russia, Brindley & Foster church organ (link to a local Russian TV report)) for use as a classical concert venue, officially opened on 20th January 2026.

Not unsurprisingly, following the seizure, closure & nationalisation of the English Church building by the Bolsheviks, the modern Anglican Church in St Petersburg, which held its first post-Soviet Eucharist service on November 7th 1993 (and currently holds its 4pm Sunday services in the ground-floor chapel of the Lutheran Petrikirche), retains no records or archive material relating to the pre-1917 period. 

Copies of church or consular registers were often sent back to London in Victorian times for archiving purposes and can now be found in the London Archives (e.g. the Petersburg church's Banns Book (June 1877-November 1900), CLC/335), which is the official repository for records relating to the Church of England's Diocese in Europe, or in The National Archives at Kew.

The National Archives has a useful online research guide on how to look for records of Births, marriages & deaths abroad and it includes an extensive appendix with an alphabetical listing of countries and the corresponding registers of overseas births, baptisms, marriages & deaths, which are typically Foreign Office embassy & consular registers now held at Kew.

Besides St Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad and Moscow, the appendix also lists local records held for: 

Archangel [Arkhangelsk], Batum [*], Berdiansk (Osipenko) [**], Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), Estonia - Pernau [Pärnu] & Tallinn (Reval), Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Latvia - Libau [Liepāja], Riga & Windau [Ventspils], Lithuania - Kovno [Kaunas] & Memel [Klaipėda], Nicolaiyev [**], Novorossisk, Odessa [**], Poti [*], Rostov, Sebastapol [**], Theodosia (Feodosiya) [**] and Vladivostok.

[*] now the Georgian port cities of Batumi & Poti; [**] now the Ukrainian port cities of Berdiansk, Mykolaiv, Odesa and, in Crimea, Sevastopol & Feodosia

Meanwhile, all records and papers from the Anglican Church in St Petersburg (with some papers from church activity in Cronstadt, Schlisselburg, Archangel & Moscow) that were in situ in the church when it was closed by the Bolsheviks in 1920 are now held locally in the Russian State Historical Archives (RGIA) - the site is in Russian only, so use Google or Yandex.Translate to view in English. 

The microfiche images from the RGIA of the English/Factory Church's registers, containing birth/death/marriage (or, more accurately, christening, marriage and burial) entries for the period 1723-1867, have recently been uploaded by a local researcher to Yandex Disk, the Russian cloud service equivalent to Google Drive - see: disk.yandex.com/d/3-tmejePIbiObQ (see too this guide to which church registers are in which Yandex Disk folder).

The online family records project of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has also collected many of the St Petersburg baptismal & marriage records together and these can be found online at www.familysearch.org, including images of their computer printout, compiled in 1975/76, of the baptismal & marriage records of the Chapel of the British Factory in St Petersburg, 1723-1866 - search under Catalog/Place for “British Factory, St Petersburg, Russia” and then click on the “Church records” results.

Some of the results, including images of the Publication of banns in the British Church at St Petersburg, 1877-1900 (with the original Banns Book itself held at the London Archives (see above)) are not available to view online, but are viewable via FamilySearch Centers which are located in LDS church meetinghouses and in affiliate libraries, which in the UK include The National Archives at Kew and the London Archives in Clerkenwell.

British burials in St Petersburg usually took place in the two main (German) Lutheran cemeteries, the Smolenskoye and the Volkovskoye, and in Kronstadt in the Lutheran cemetery there. There is no official online listing of graves, although the first two cemeteries do feature on the FindAGrave.com site - search under "Saint Petersburg" - and some graves are listed on this Russian site for the Smolenskoye Lutheran cemetery. And local researchers have published multi-volume books listing those graves still standing in the Smolenskoye (2 volumes by Robert Leinonen) and the Volkovskoye (4 volumes by Dr Benedikt Böhm) cemeteries. The cemeteries have suffered from neglect and vandalism (and partial redevelopment in the late Soviet period), but some graves in the Smolenskoye cemetery, including those of Charles & Francis Baird, are still visible.

Besides the London Archives, the other main UK centre of information on the British in Imperial Russia is the Leeds Russian Archive at Leeds University, which holds many family records & objects donated by the descendants of British families who had lived and worked in pre-1917 Russia/St Petersburg.

For more on the British community in the period up to, and immediately after, the Russian Revolution, see this catalogue from a 2017 exhibition, "Caught in the Russian Revolution", put on using items drawn from the Leeds Russian Archive. And for the personal story of one incredible individual, Violet Froom, who did so much to help elderly, infirm and destitute members of the British Colony left in Petrograd following the Revolution, using the English Church building as a nursing home/soup kitchen, see this short chapter, "The Story of an Englishwoman", from a 1956 book by Meriel Buchanan, daughter of the last British Ambassador to the Russian Empire.

And if your family history research also includes the British community in Moscow pre-1917, more information on some of the key families linked to St Andrew's Anglican Church can be found on this site which is maintained by Helen Watson who is a former church council member and official church historian at St Andrew's. Helen also now has a Substack on the British Colony in Imperial Moscow.

(*) For information, there was also another English-language (but non-Anglican, i.e. Nonconformist) church in St Petersburg, the British-American Congregational Church, which was licensed as a chapel to the American Legation and was established in 1816 by John Paterson of the British & Foreign Bible Society. From 1840, the church was located at 16 Novo-Isaakievskaya Ulitsa (now 16 Yakubovicha Ulitsa); the building is still standing but today houses the Ministry of the Interior (MVD) Passport Office No.1 for the Admiralteiskiy district. For more on its history, see the article "A Congregational Church in Revolutionary Petrograd" in the Congregational History Society Magazine, Vol. 8, No.4, Autumn 2017 (pp.57-64).

And transcripts of birth, marriage and burial records covering the period 1818-1918 from both the British-American Congregational Church in St Petersburg (which is church A+B in this 2001 file which shows the date ranges and General Register Office reference for the records) and the smaller satellite Congregational Church in Alexandroffsky (church C), which at the time was outside the city and was on the grounds of an American-run factory that produced rolling stock for the Russian railways, can be found in The National Archives at Kew.

Nonconformist records can also be searched online via TheGenealogist website, which provides the records online on behalf of The National Archives.