Church, cemetery and family records are often the only record of milestones in the lives of the early Kansans. The State of Kansas did not require birth certificates or start keeping official records of deaths until July 1, 1911. Marriage certificates began to be filed in Kansas on May 1, 1913.   

Early pastors traveled between multiple congregations and parishes. When a pastor returned to a specific congregation or church, he often baptized several children or adults on the same date. The baptisms were recorded in a Ministerial Logbook and included each name, date of birth, the names of the parents and names of the sponsors.  

Marriages, deaths and burials were not always recorded in the Ministerial Logbooks, typically because the pastor not available at the time or the congregation was temporarily without a pastor. Confirmation records are more complete as confirmations were usually planned for a time when the pastor would be present.   

All the St. Luke’s pastors’ records were handwritten in Norwegian until 1907. The pastors often recorded names differently than what appeared in family records or on the tombstones in St. Luke’s Cemetery. This time period also saw immigrants Americanizing their names, like Johannes Neuenschwander, who changed his name to John S. Niceschwander, and Jorgen Kaad, who gradually adopted George Kaad, Sr. as his name.  

Tracing family connections is often difficult because many Scandinavian immigrants dropped the patronymic naming practices of their home countries. George Kaad, Sr.’s wife – Anne Katrine Peterson – was the daughter of Peter J. Johnson aka Peter J. Johannsen. She and her brother George I. Petersen continued the practice of using their father’s name as their last own name although Anne used an “o” in Peterson and George used an “e”. Their sisters – Mary (Johnson) Olsen and Tena (Johnson) (Dennis) Collin – adopted their father’s last name when they came to America. Similar examples abound in the St. Luke’s Church records and among the gravestones in St. Luke’s Cemetery. 

The original 1875 – 1906 Ministerial Logbook for St. Luke’s Church has not been found. Fortunately, both St. Luke’s Ministerial Logbooks were preserved on microfilm in 1969 by a Lutheran archival group that traveled the Midwest with a portable scanner.  

The microfilmed images of the St. Luke’s Ministerial Logbooks are stored with ELCA Archives, 321 Bonnie Lane, Elk Grove Village, Illinois 60007; [email protected]. Congregations and churches may request digital copies of their records, which are also available on Ancestry.com. Individuals may request additional information by contacting the ELCA Archives.  

Throughout the history of St. Luke’s, the congregation joined with other nearby churches to share the services – and costs – of a shared pastor. This practice started in 1880 when the St. Luke’s congregation officially become a member of a parish served by Pastor E. O. Dale. The churches and preaching places were at Mankato, St. Luke’s, White Rock, Glasco, Morganville (then called Morgantown) and St. John’s (northeast of Jamestown.)

Glasco, St. John’s, and St. Luke’s formed a separate parish in 1882. This parish built a parsonage in Jamestown.

In 1906, the congregations of St. Luke’s and Our Savior’s Lutheran Church at Norway formed a new parish that did not include the Glasco or St. John’s churches.  The pastor and his family lived in the parsonage at Norway.

The church in Mankato joined with St. Luke’s and the Norway church in 1915. The three churches remained in the same parish nearly thirty years, briefly adding a new Lutheran congregation in Concordia.

Sometime after 1942, the churches in Mankato and Concordia each called a resident pastor. Norway and St. Luke’s continued as a single parish until St. Luke’s closed in 1956.