Photograph: National Archives. Washington, D.C., Nov. 22. 1939. “Another one of the spacious filing spaces in the National Archives: the Division of Commerce Department Archives.” Courtesy: Library of Congress.
The U.S. National Archives is called the nation’s filing cabinet. It is home to billions of records that if laid side to side would circle the earth more than 57 times. Imagine what information they may hold about your ancestors!
The following video will teach you about some lesser-known genealogically rich federal resources, where to look for clues that your ancestor interacted with the U.S. government, and how to learn about what records are available for research.
Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Buffalo, Erie County, New York. 1899-1900 Vol. 2, 1899, image 24.
Sanborn fire insurance maps are large-scale detailed property maps that include building outlines and property boundaries. You can use Sanborn maps to locate homes, churches, schools, and businesses, and learn the history of a street or neighborhood. Along with other atlases and maps listed in our research guide, Sanborn maps can be an essential tool for local history research.
“Sanborns” are especially useful because of their high level of detail; only a few streets are illustrated on each page. The maps were originally created to assist fire insurance agents in determining the hazard potential of a particular property. The size, shape, and construction of each building is indicated, as well as fire walls, windows, doors, sprinkler systems, and types of roofs. The maps were plotted by traveling surveyors who were tasked with gathering information on buildings in mostly urban areas. The maps were then hand-colored using a system that identified building materials–for example, yellow for wood-framed buildings, pink for brick.
The Grosvenor Room has Sanborn atlases that cover sections of Buffalo from 1881 to 1986. Updated editions were not published every year or even every decade. Instead, new sections were pasted on the original pages when buildings were added, altered, or demolished. When a Sanborn is dated 1881-1888, it means that the atlas was created in 1881, with corrections through 1888.
Until we can use the physical volumes again, you can access Sanborn maps of WNY towns and cities through the following online sites.
Sanborn Maps of New York 1867-1970is a database that BECPL subscribes to with free access from home with your library card. It covers hundreds of New York State cities and towns, including over 50 Erie County locations. See our map research guide for a chart listing the volumes that include Buffalo. Here’s a short tutorial on using the Sanborn database:
The Library of Congress also has a digital collection of Sanborn maps that includes Buffalo and many Erie County towns. You can browse it here and find locations using the key map and index of each volume
2020 is a census year and we’ve been hearing a lot about the importance of being counted. But, what you may not know is that census records preserve family history.
Check out the videos below to learn about the census and how to access and search census records using the Library’s databases.
For more tips and trick on searching census records using the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library’s databases, click here.
For an overview of what questions are asked for each census year see our online guide.
Your photographs are a unique part of your personal and family history, and taking time now to better organize and preserve them will keep them safe for years to come.
To start, gather up all your photographic prints and albums. Weed out those you no longer need (give away, re-purpose, or recycle). If you have photos of local landmarks, buildings, or events, consider donating a copy to a library or historical society.
How and where you store your photos at home can help prevent damage from handling and the environment. Watch this short video presentation and see the links below for resources on storage products and ideas.
Here’s an overview of storage options:
Paper storage: folders, envelopes, boxes, albums, and interleaving pages that are acid-free and lignin-free. Paper can be “buffered” meaning it contains a non-acidic (alkaline) material that can neutralize acid as it forms. This is best for most photographs. Unbuffered paper storage is recommended for cyanotypes, blueprints, color photos, and color negatives.
Plastic storage: Sheets and sleeves made of polyester, polypropylene, or polyethylene. No PVC or vinyl.
Look for products that have passed the P.A.T.–the Photographic Activity Test. These are stable and will not damage your photos.
Here are some suggested ways to store common photographs:
Small prints–Prints in individual plastic sleeves and stored vertically in a box that is slightly larger than the prints. Or, prints in a binder or album with plastic sleeves that hold multiple photos.
Oversize prints (larger than 8×10)–Horizontal, flat storage in a large box. Interleave with acid free paper, or place each in a sleeve, envelope, or folder.
Albums & scrapbooks—If possible, leave intact. Place acid free paper between pages to prevent damage from photos sticking together and transferring acid. You might be able to remove the pages from the binding and just keep the pages. Place in a box and store flat. If you have one of those “magnetic” sticky albums and the photos are stuck, you can try the dental floss method seen in this video from the Smithsonian!
Negatives–Vertical storage, upright in box. Plastic or paper sleeves.
Do you have a budding musician in your family? The library has resources to help get them practicing. Start out by having them listen to the following librarian curated music list with Freegal, a music database subscribed to by the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library. Freegal is available to B&ECPL library card holders from home with your card number. If you don’t have a card yet, you can sign-up here to get access to the Library’s online resources.
If you are looking for online sheet music the following websites are free:
IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library– Free public domain sheet music library, containing close to 40,000 scores (some of which include orchestral parts). Created by the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP).
Choral Public Domain Library: ChoralWiki– Internet resource for choral music, with a large (and growing) collection of digitized choral sheet music scores, composer pages, and translations. Search for sheet music by title or composer, or browse in a number of categories.
The Grosvenor Room at the Central Library is home to tens of thousands of music scores covering numerous genres. When the Library reopens, we welcome you to take advantage of our vast collection. If you don’t live close to Downtown and if you have a B&ECPL library card, no worries. A large portion of the score collection can be transferred for a small fee to the B&ECPL location closest to your home.
If you are looking for a particular song, search our online catalog. The best way to search for music scores is to perform an advanced search:
Input the song title in the This Exact Phrase field and choose the Format type to Music.
Then your results list will show you if we have the song and where it is located.
We hope this helps get your budding musicians to take an interest in their instruments again, and we look forward to assisting you with your music score needs when the Library reopens.
Our “Local History from Home” series continues with another resource we use constantly–City directories. A city directory is an alphabetical list of adult residents along with their home address and often their occupation or employer. These directories are similar in style to telephone books, but existed long before telephones were invented, and are still published today. City directories were published yearly (with some exceptions). The Grosvenor Room collection includes Buffalo directories 1832 to the present, as well as many years of separately published volumes for Niagara Falls, Lockport, East Aurora, Hamburg, and Tonawanda, and other select cities and towns.
Directories can help you research a person, a business, or a house. In some years (Buffalo: 1929 to present), you are able to “reverse look-up” the street address to identify the residents or business listed.
While not all directories are online, there are some sites that allow you to search and browse historic years. We digitized our Buffalo directories, 1832-1913, as part of an ongoing project to help preserve the fragile volumes and provide another option for access. The collection is part of the New York Heritage digital collection; click here to view the directories.
Here’s a quick tutorial on browsing and searching the directories:
Ancestry Library Database also has Buffalo city directories, 1860-1960, along with many other cities across the US. You can browse pages or try to search for an individual. Ancestry is currently allowing at home access; just log in to our database page with your library card number.
Here’s a quick video showing how to access and search the directories in Ancestry:
Things to keep in mind while using historic directories:
Women’s names rarely appear in directories before the 1920s unless they were widows or heads of households. Children’s names do not appear at all.
Directories often contain inaccuracies, or may be incomplete; be sure to check for misspellings.
Expect gaps in coverage. Directories are not always published yearly.
Towns and villages in Erie County first began to be included in the Buffalo city directories after 1945. Unfortunately, with a very few exceptions,there are no earlier directories for the towns and villages.
Buffaloresearch.com, a wonderful site curated by Cynthia Van Ness of the Buffalo History Museum, also lists alternative sources for city directories online, including Google Books and Hathi Trust.
Click the link below to learn some tips from the Grosvenor Room staff on researching your family history from home. We hope it helps bring you closer to your family during this difficult time. We look forward to assisting you when we resume full service again.
Looking for a new project to keep you busy during isolation? Maybe you’ve always wanted to research the history of your house, learn more about a local family business or a historic event in Buffalo, or dig up information on an ancestor? While we can’t wait to get our hands back on the plentiful resources in the Grosvenor Room, there are some online tools that can help you start or continue your research. As newspapers are one of our most frequently used resources, we’ll start with these sites that offer access to Buffalo area papers.
Fultonhistory.com is an unusual looking website, but it is truly the best free collection of Buffalo and Erie County town newspapers spanning many years. It is the personal project of one man, and as such, it looks and functions a bit differently from other databases. It includes the following Buffalo papers:
Buffalo Courier/Daily Courier, 1847-1926
Buffalo Courier Express, 1926-1970
Buffalo Evening News, 1881-1963
Buffalo Express, 1866-1874
Buffalo Evening Courier & Republic 1862-1884,
Buffalo Polish Weekly Review 1929-1930
Buffalo Morning Express 1880 – 1924
And these newspapers from Erie County towns:
Blasdell Frontier Herald 1956-1966
Hamburg County Independent 1875-1944
Hamburg Sun 1945-1988
Hamburg Front Page 1964-1979
Hamburg Photo News 1970-1976
Lackawanna Leader, 1936-1958
Lancaster Star, 1878-1880
Lancaster Times, 1878-1902
Lancaster Enterprise, 1895-1966
Lancaster Bee, 1985-2001
The site also has papers from North Tonawanda, Lockport, Gowanda, Olean, and other WNY towns, in addition to hundreds of titles from across NY State and Pennsylvania.
Watch this quick tutorial on using the site:
A “Boolean” search using keywords and some database “lingo” is a great way to narrow your search. Let’s say you are looking for information on your house, hoping to find out who lived there previously, or if anything interesting happened there. Here’s a sample search: “125 Parkwood” and (Filename contains (Buffalo NY))
Putting an address or a name in quotes searches for that exact phrase. Adding the (filename contains (Buffalo NY)) makes sure that you will only get results from Buffalo newspapers on the website and won’t have to dig through results from other cities. Search for a name by typing w/1 between the first and last name to find those names within one word of each other. Click search, and you’ll have a list of results.
New York Historic Newspapersis a free searchable database of newspapers digitized and contributed by libraries and colleges across NY state.
In addition to some 19th century daily Buffalo newspapers, you can search the following titles:
Buffalo Criterion, 1952-1989
Grand Island News, 1936
Island Dispatch (Grand Island), 1944-1963
Lackawanna papers, several titles, 1917-1982
Dziennik Dla Wszystkich = Polish Everybody’s Daily, 1911-1941
Student newspapers from the University at Buffalo, Canisius, and Erie Community College.
This site allows you to search across all of the papers, just those from Erie County, just from Buffalo, or within one specific title.
You can also browse individual issues of a specific paper by clicking on the Calendar view of that title.
For more resources, please see our research guides on newspapers.
Our “Local History from Home” series continues with another resource we use constantly–City directories. A city directory is an alphabetical list of 
The Grosvenor Room: Genealogy, Local History, Maps, Music & Rare Books 