Access the Sacramento room from home with some electronic resources that can help you find answers:
Sacramento Room Digital Collections: High-resolution photographs, postcards, ephemera, maps and periodicals that are described and fully keyword searchable by optical character recognition software.
City of Sacramento Records Library: Search building permits, city council minutes and various other public documents relating to the Capital City back to the 1920s.
Sacramento Bee (library card and PIN required): A treasure trove of digital content that goes all the way back to 1857. Keyword searchable and allows downloading by article or page.
California Digital Newspaper Collection: The first stop for access to historical California newspapers. Included are the
Sacramento Union from 1851 to 1922, Sacramento’s first newspaper, the
Placer Times, and very other local publications. Keyword searchable via optical character recognition software.
Sanborn Insurance Maps (library card and PIN Required): Detailed access to maps of California cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sacramento is covered for years 1895, 1915 and 1952.
USGS Historical Maps: An easy to access portal to high-resolution historical USGS topographical maps for the entire country. For Sacramento, local maps from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Ancestry.com -
Access to this resource has been temporarily expanded to library cardholders working remotely, courtesy of ProQuest and its partner Ancestry.
Discover your unique family history with billions of free records from around the world, including census and vital records, immigration and passport records, plus periodicals, books and photos. You can also send documents home from the library for your own records. Available in-library only.
Heritage Quest (library card and PIN required): Genealogical content that includes the U.S. Census.
Center for Sacramento History Online Catalog: Over 50,000 low-resolution photographs that cover Sacramento from European contact to the present.