Local history is the historical study of a locality such as a city, town, district, or even state. This guide focuses on historical resources concerning Niagara County. Family history or genealogy is the study of families, tracing of their history and ancestry.
History of Niagara County, N.Y.: With Illustrations Descriptive of Its Scenery, Private Residences, Public Buildings, Fine Blocks, and Important Manufactories, and Portraits of Old Pioneers and Prominent Residents. Sanford & Company, New York, 1878.
The Research Library, which was established in 1818, collects, preserves and makes available materials that support State government work. The Library's collections, now numbering over 20 million items, may also be used by other researchers on-site, online and via interlibrary loan.
The Digital Public Library of America or DPLA is a discovery tool for public domain and openly licensed content held by the archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions in the United States.
New York Heritage is a research portal for learning more about the rich history of New York State.These digital collections represent a broad range of historical, scholarly, and cultural materials, including photographs, letters, diaries, oral histories, city directories, maps, newspapers, books, and more.
HathiTrust contains a collection of over 15 million volumes of searchable books, journals, and government documents, including 5.8 million available as full-text online.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. They have an extensive collection of digitized texts.
Library Databases
These are subscription databases available in the Lewis Library or from home using your T-Wolves credentials.
This resource covers the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. This database covers all key journals in the discipline, state and local history publications, and selected articles from scholarly journals in the social sciences and humanities. In addition to standard search features, this database allows for searching by time period, an essential feature given the extensive range of its coverage.
JSTOR provides access to more than 10 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in many academic disciplines, especially arts, literature, humanities, history and biology.
The AAS Historical Periodicals Collection contains more than 6,500 historical periodical titles dating from 1693 to 1877.
Series 1 presents titles dating from 1693 through 1820.
Series 2 presents over 1000 titles dating from 1821 through 1837. The collection represents over two centuries of print culture, ranging from early works imported by the colonists to later titles published on American soil on the eve of the Revolution and during the early republic.
Series 3 presents over 1,700 titles dating from 1838 through 1852. The themes presented in Series 3 reveal a rapidly growing young nation, where industrialization, the railroads, regional political differences, and life on the western frontier were daily realities. Subjects covered in the collection reach into every facet of American life, including science, literature, medicine, agriculture, women’s fashion, family life, and religion.
Series 4 presents over 1,100 titles dating from 1853 through 1865. While the Civil War is a focal point of the collection, we also find a diverse record of the continuance of daily life for many Americans—both leading up to and during the war. News from the battlefront can be found, in addition to the usual breadth of subject matter found in previous collections that include science, literature, medicine, agriculture, women’s fashion, family life, and religion.
Series 5 presents over 2,500 titles dating from 1866 through 1877. The themes presented in Series 5 reflect a nation that persevered through a most difficult set of circumstances: a bloody civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives; the incorporation of the recently-freed African Americans into American life; a population that rapidly expanded into the Western territories. Broad subject areas covered in the collection reach into every facet of American life, including science, literature, medicine, agriculture, women’s fashion, family life, and religion.
A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals across all subject areas. Coverage is primarily from 1980 to the present, with some older content.
Includes peer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources with extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects.
