BlockBefore
Decorative drawing: a fortress-like armory with crenellated towers. Not a photograph of this place.

Explore by state

Old maps, photographs and public records of American places. Pick a state on the map, or use the field below.

The archive is growing: 2 states published so far, with more on the way. Tell us which state or county you want first and we will build toward it.

Pick a state

2 of 50 covered

Highlighted states have records. The rest are not yet ingested, and nothing here pretends otherwise: a state the archive has not reached cannot be opened.

Alaska Hawaii Alabama Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Alaska Hawaii
The lower 48, from Census Bureau boundaries. Alaska and Hawaii are left off this drawing because including them shrinks every other state past recognition; both will appear in the list above once they carry records.

What is covered

Counted from the pages this site actually publishes, not from what the sources contain.

StateCounties SettlementsListed Narrative
Massachusetts142,280320410,839,040 words
Ohio887,035329433,741,049 words

What the archive holds

The same five kinds of record in every county it reaches. All of it is public domain or openly licensed, and every page links to the original it was taken from.

Topographic sheetsEvery United States Geological Survey sheet that covers a place, from the 1890s to the 2000s, with the earliest and latest wipeable against each other.
Fire insurance atlasesThe printed index of a town's mills, tanneries and hotels, read off the scanned sheet. Those names have never been text anywhere else.
County historiesNineteenth-century narrative compiled while the settlers' children were alive to be asked, reproduced complete rather than summarised.
National Register recordsEvery listed property, with the full federal nomination that argued it on to the register.
Surveyed structuresBuildings and bridges recorded by the Historic American Engineering Record, with their written histories.

Provenance

  • State boundaries. Census Bureau TIGERweb. A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
  • Coverage figures. Computed from the pages in this build. They change when the archive grows and are not quoted from anywhere.
  • Rights. Sources carry four different bases, set out on the rights page.