Genealogy & Local History 

Trace your family's history.

• 4 billion names in worldwide historical records.
• Family tree services.
• Genealogy learning materials.

Access restricted within library buildings only.

For help getting started, see our AncestryLibrary help videos.

Reveal your families history with this rich genealogy resource.

• Search historical census databases
• 28,000 local and family histories
• Revolutionary War database search
• Freedman's Bank search

Search thousands of obituaries with HeritageHub via Newsbank.

Learn about Palo Alto history. This online collection contains Palo Alto newspapers going back to the 1870s.

Full-text digital scans are searchable by keyword, name, place, and publishing year.

• Palo Alto Live Oak (10/28/1896 – 1903)
• Palo Alto Press (1901-1902)
• Palo Altan (12/1/1905-12/28/1906, 1912-1914)
• Mayfield Enterprise (3/5/1870-5/3/1871)
• Citizen (3/5/1904-12/31/1905)
• The Daily Palo Alto (published by students of Leland Stanford Univ. 9/3/1902-12/17/1902)
• The Palo Alto Times (1893-11/23/1905)
• The Daily Palo Alto Times (1/9/1908-1918)

Search citations of local news stories going back to 1989. Some of the articles can be retrieved from the microfilm collection at Rinconada Library.>

News from over 2,000 local, regional, and national publications.

• Newspapers, journals, newswires, broadcast transcripts, and videos.
• Thousands of obituaries
• From 53 States and Territories.
• Customize news alerts on specific topics.
• 1978-present.

Search Palo Alto obituaries from 1890 to present.

Dive into the history of Palo Alto. PAHA's collections include:

• Historical images
• Local publications
• Obituaries
• Organizational and business archives
• Oral histories

The Sutro Library holds the original collection of Adolph Sutro (1830–1898), California businessman and San Francisco mayor.

• The largest genealogy collections in the U.S.
• William Shakespeare's First, Second, Third and Fourth folios (1623–1685);
• Letters and papers of British explorer and naturalist Joseph Banks (1800s);
• The Mexican Collection: materials on Mexican culture, religion and politics (1540–1889)
• Belgian mapmaker Pieter van den Keere's World Map (1611).