California Dreamin': Researching the Golden State

Gena Philibert Ortega looks at online resources to help you learn more about your California ancestor (page 30)

California’s history is the story of people looking for a better way of life. Whether your ancestor was here prior to statehood or came on the promise of gold or even later as the dust bowl caused the migration of families fleeing poverty, there are resources throughout the state and on the Internet that will help you learn more about your Californian ancestor.

As you begin your research, make sure to include genealogical and historical societies in the city/county you are researching. These societies often have their own library collections which may or may not be cataloged on the Internet. Collections may include histories of the locality and cemetery transcriptions. Members might also be able to suggest additional places nearby with research collections. To find societies in California, consult the California State Genealogical Alliance at www.csga.com.

Information about some of the earliest Californians can be found in two collections housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino and the Claremont Colleges. The Huntington Library’s Early California Population Project, www.huntington.org/Information/ECPPmain.htm is an online database of records from the Mission period. The website contains mission records, including baptisms, marriages and burials, covering the years 1769-1850. This database is an important resource since it includes records from 21 of California’s missions, many of which are too brittle to handle or are stored away in archives.

The website’s links to Search Tips and Users Guide will provide you with ideas for how to conduct your search and what is available in the database. Reading the records digitized in this collection is no easy task. Remember that the records are written in Spanish and that 18th and 19th century writing can be difficult to read. The website states that the database contains over 100,000 baptisms, 27,000 marriages and 71,000 burials. Though this is a free database, you will need to register to search it.

Another resource for early California records is the Claremont Colleges Digital Library’s Matrimonial Investigation Records of the San Gabriel Mission at
http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/collection.php?alias=/mir. These interviews with couples eager to marry cover the period from 1788 to 1861 and include other missions as well. 165 investigations are part of this special collection and provide the genealogical researcher with information about the couple and their family. Matrimonial investigations were done by a Catholic priest to make sure that the couple was eligible to be married. Questions were meant to verify current marital status and any familial relationship between the couple.

When you do not have access to the details of your ancestor’s life as penned by them, it can be helpful to check out what their contemporaries had to say about life, their community and current events. The Library of Congress has great online genealogical resources and one of those is the American Memory Project. Within that project is California As I Saw It: First Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849-1900, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem /cbhtml/cbhome.html. 190 eyewitness accounts tell the story of California’s early history. These narratives can help you to flesh out the story of your ancestor and their experiences. If your early California ancestor was Chinese, then make sure to check out American Memory’s The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award99/cubhtml/cichome.html. This collection includes 8,000 images and pages of primary source material. Both collections can be searched or browsed by keyword, subject and title.

California has both a state archive and a state library that houses historical and genealogical primary and secondary sources. The California State Library, www.library.ca.gov, has a link on their homepage for genealogy. Clicking on that link will take you to a page spotlighting their history and genealogy collection, research guides, and services. This library has a rich collection of resources that include city directories, telephone books, county histories, photographs and California history books. Newspapers on microfilm at the Library can be borrowed through interlibrary loan. Their manuscript collection, which can only be accessed onsite, contains everything from correspondence, diaries, court papers, scrapbooks and more.

Searching the Library’s catalog at www.lib.state.ca.us not only retrieves results for the California State Library, but also the Sutro Library, a genealogy library located in San Francisco. Sutro has one of the largest genealogy collections in the West aside from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.... to see the rest of this article, subscribe now and request to start with this issue!

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