If you are making a family tree, are curious about your state’s history, or are just a history buff, state archives offices are a treasure trove of readily accessible information. State archives include countless primary documents dating back all the way back to the states’ founding.
In many state archives offices these records are all in the process of being digitized, which will allow for much quicker and easier access. State archives are also free, which makes them an excellent starting point when you are searching for information pertaining to numerous types of public records.
These records allow interested parties to search for anything from a newspaper article that your mother wrote thirty years ago, to discovering if the story about your relation to Benedict Arnold is really true.
What State Archives Offices Do
The mission of a state archives office is to preserve records of interest pertaining to people or events from its specific state. This description sounds vague because, well, it is. The information collected within a state archive office is vast due to large amount and genres of information.
For example, birth, death, marriage and divorce certificates are constantly being added to state databases. Events of state interest, like important people and events from a state, are also catalogued. For example, the state archives office of Missouri has a great deal of information pertaining to the Civil War because of the war’s state wide historical importance.
Using Public Records for Research Projects
For the scholars out there, state archive offices are the perfect place to start any number of research projects. Information like state populations, land use policies, court records, and patents are all housed within the state archives. Patent records can be especially useful due to their ability to help prevent you from spending years reinventing the solar-powered indoor backscratcher.
Public Records for Family Trees
Creating a family tree can be a long and tedious process, but it can also bear great rewards. You may be related to a variety of famous people and not even know it. Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Marilyn Monroe, and 2Pac are but a sample of people to whom you may be able to trace your genealogical line. The first hurdle when creating a family tree is figuring out where to begin.
State archives offices are a perfect place to begin a genealogy search because they are both free and maintain vast records of birth and death certificates. This means that if you have just a sketchy outline of your family tree, state archives can be a huge help in filling in the gaps.
For example, if all you know of your great-grandmother is that she lived in New Hampshire, then you can use the New Hampshire archives to find her birth certificate and hopefully find her parents name and address.
Online Public Records Archives
An alternative to state archives offices is using online public records directories for all certificate retrieval needs. A large expanse of web-based databases offer users the opportunity to access all kinds of records like court, criminal, birth, death, marriage, divorce and genealogy records. Many of these sites work as aggregators that pull information from different states and counties to allow people to find the records they need through a more centrally organized portal.
State archives are home to millions of records and documents that make them invaluable to people looking to track down their genealogy or for history aficionados. So if you are looking for any type of public records, then state archives offices are excellent starting points for anyone's research.
