Let’s Visit The Historical Society of Pennsylvania A Virtual Field Trip by Kurt Schmel, Josh Polensky, Mike Hogan and Meliza Reynoso

Let’s Visit the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Where do we go if we want to visit to the Historical Society??

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is in Center City Philadelphia, just a quick ride away from anywhere in the Delaware Valley

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania We can’t go there right now, but we can still take a look around and see what they have to offer.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania The building looks like a museum or a library, doesn’t it? It IS a museum, and a library, and more !

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania After we come in, we enter the Reference Room

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Here we can find all kinds of books about the history of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania If we want to look at older documents we can find many of them in the Greenfield Room

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Here we can find copies of newspapers, government records, and other information that would be too bulky to keep in it’s original form or too fragile to make available to researchers.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania The “Restricted Use” Room is where many historians spend time doing research

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania This room is where most people use the Historical Society’s materials. There’s room to spread out and get to work.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania To find Immigration History we can go into the Family History Room

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania This room is where most people use the materials collected by the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies. The Balch Institute collected huge collections of immigration records, family histories, letters, diaries, and more...all looking at the experience of immigrants to the United States.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania We can find: –Passenger lists of ships that arrived in Philadelphia carrying immigrants

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania We can find: –Copies of individual’s immigration records

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania We might even find: –Personal information –Many families have donated their family records like birth and marriage records

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania We’ve just seen the public areas of the Historical Society...but there’s more that most people never get to see...

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania The Historical Society has thousands and thousands of books, microfilms, papers, pictures and more... Not all of it is kept in the reference rooms, most of it is stored until someone asks to use it.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania They normally don’t let people wander around through the storage areas, but let’s take a peek... What could be in all of those books and boxes ?? Could your family history be in there somewhere??

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania

To find out more about the Historical Society, or to search through their online collections, visit their website:

What if I don’t live in Philadelphia ? There are Historical Societies for almost every state, city or county:

What if I don’t live in Philadelphia ? If you don’t know where your local historical Society is, just type in “historical society” + where you are in a search engine like Google...we’re sure you’ll find it!