Little Harlem Club Band. Photograph from BECPL Digital Collections
The Library’s Digital Collections provide online access to selected newspapers, photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, and other treasures from the Rare Book Room, Grosvenor Room, and branch libraries.
The Grosvenor Room has many resources to help you research Buffalo’s rich music history. The Buffalo Collection includes books on music organizations and musicians, as well as scrapbooks and newspaper clipping files. Check out our new research guide onBuffalo Music History.
We have a unique collection of thousands of programs chronicling music performances from the 1840s to the present, from piano recitals in private homes to concerts by famous conductors, orchestras, and opera singers. Fifty selected programs from the collection are available online in our digital collection – Historic Buffalo Theater and Music Programs.
The bulk of the collection is from 1860 to 1930 and includes performances of dance, opera, musical comedy, orchestras, chamber music, choirs, and instrumental ensembles. Many local venues hosted famous musicians and composers including Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Jenny Lind, Geraldine Farrar, Maurice Ravel, Walter Damrosch, Gustave Mahler, Lily Pons, and Serge Rachmaninoff.
Buffalo audiences also heard the music of opera companies and symphonies from New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Early Buffalo orchestras and singing societies, including the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Orpheus, and Chromatic Club, are also documented in this collection, as are the music halls, theatres, social clubs, museums, and other venues at which they performed.
Zorah Berry, Beach Photograph, circa 1930s
Many of these notable musicians and ensembles were brought to Buffalo concert halls by successful female impresarios, including Mai Davis Smith, Marian de Forest, Louise Michael, Genevieve Kraft, Bessie Bellanca, and Zorah Berry. Smith, De Forest, and Berry also saved photographs of the renowned performers they met, many of which are autographed. These make up the core of another unique resource in the Grosvenor Room, the [Performing Artists Photograph Collection], 1890-1976.
Ann Montgomery
Another successful entrepreneur in Buffalo music history is Ann Montgomery, who operated The Little Harlem Club/Hotel on Michigan Avenue. From the 1930s through early 1960s, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and others performed at her nightclub. A selection of programs and photographs from the club are featured in another digital collection – Ann Montgomery’s Little Harlem.
Have you explored the genealogy databases available through the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library? DigiGen, the online video below, will teach you what we have, how to access them, and what types of records and data they provide. You might be surprised at what we have to offer.
For this installment we’ll cover two free websites with substantial collections of historic books, journals, magazines, government documents and other publications: Google Books and HathiTrust. Both sites were launched over 10 years ago and have become essential tools for history research. Google and HathiTrust partnered with academic libraries to scan and provide digital access to millions of titles.
Books in the public domain or those published before 1923 are likely to be included in one of these websites. For more information on public domain and copyright, see this helpful guide by Stanford University.
Schools of Buffalo: A souvenir history and description of the public schools of Buffalo, 1899. Retrieved from Hathitrust.org, 5-12-2020.
Both sites also allow partial or snippet views of more recent publications. This can be very helpful for research, as it is a way to discover specific references in books or journals (those needle-in-a-haystack discoveries). You can then search the library catalog to find a physical copy of the book.
Don’t let their scholarly origins deter you–both Google Books and HathiTrust are easy to use, whether searching for specific titles as you would in a library catalog, or using the keyword search.
If you are researching Buffalo African American genealogy or history, the Grosvenor Room has two new resources that may help.
The first is a list of African American Churches, including current and prior addresses and the approximate timeframe at each address. The second is its accompanying map:
The purpose of these resources is to help genealogists locate churches that were near their ancestors’ homes for the correct timeframe. (We hope you find many other uses for it.) To help achieve this purpose, the map’s markers are labeled by the years that it was located at the selected address. The markers are also color-coded by religious denomination. Clicking on a marker will reveal the church’s name, current and prior addresses, and if the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library carries records for the selected church.
If you are looking for more research guidance, consult our longstanding guides:
Are you hoping to find your immigrant ancestors’ origins? Finding their passenger list may give you the information that you need. The following four part series covers U.S. passenger list history, databases, and search strategies.
1942 Hutchinson Central Technical High School yearbook
In this latest installment in our “Local History from Home” series, we’ll cover a few online sources for high school yearbooks. Yearbooks are frequently used for genealogy and reunion planning. They can also be a good resource for historic information on school buildings and education history. And they’re just fun to browse for nostalgia and discovering trends in fashion and hairstyles.
The Grosvenor Room has hundreds of yearbooks from Buffalo and Erie County schools, including high schools, colleges, and a few grammar schools. See the Yearbook guide for a list of those currently in the collection. The collection is constantly growing thanks to thoughtful donations from our community. If you’re spring cleaning and want to find a new home for your local yearbooks in good condition, we’d be happy to add them to the collection if we don’t already have those volumes. See our donation policy for more information.
While we can’t currently access the physical yearbooks, there are a few online sites that have volumes you can view. The Ancestry Library Edition database has thousands of yearbooks, including many from Buffalo area schools. Watch this short video on browsing and searching Ancestry yearbooks:
The digital collections at NewYorkHeritage.org also include some local yearbooks, as well as many for other cities across NY State. These are digitized and contributed by schools and libraries. Here’s a quick video on locating the yearbooks:
If you don’t know the high school that an ancestor or another person attended, check out our Google map below of Buffalo high schools that existed in 1917 and 1941. These years are helpful for World War I & II era students, but also cover schools that existed prior to 1900 and most after the 1940s. Students typically attended a school close to their home, and we’ve included public, private, girls, boys, and co-ed schools.
The Grosvenor Room: Genealogy, Local History, Maps, Music & Rare Books 