local archives
Regional historical repository
Local archives are repositories maintained by municipalities, counties, or regional institutions to preserve documents of community significance—land records, court proceedings, newspapers, photographs, and correspondence.
Historians and genealogists rely on them for primary sources unavailable elsewhere: I found my great-grandmother's naturalization papers in the local archives.
The term also describes the collections themselves.
- preservationMaintaining something's condition
- manuscriptsHandwritten or typed originals
- photographsLight-captured images
- community eventsOrganized local group activities
- catalogingSystematic organization into records
oral histories · family history · museums · ephemera · collective memory · government records · historical preservation · vital records · personal letters · provenance · libraries · reading room · accessioning · historical landmarks · archivists · genealogists · appraisal · folders
- historical recordsdiary, census record, annual reviews, letter, government records
- archivesarchivist, collections, repositories, records, files
- local historytown history, village history, founding, settlement, legends
- local archivescounty records, township records, town records, parish records, city records
- library featuresreading rooms, book collection, periodicals, newspapers, audiobooks
- genealogyfamily trees, family history, descendants, ancestors, ancestry tracing
local archivesnational archives
Government's historical document repository
state archives · national library · Library of Congress · federal records