Getting Started

• Come in for a visit and let our research specialists help get you started.
• Visit our website for do it yourself tutorials and free printables.
• Schedule an appointment with our Genealogy Librarian, Sherri Camp.

We generally recommend people start with themselves and work backwards.  It's always good to gather things like:

• Family Bibles
• Birth/Marriage/Death Certificates
• Naturalization Papers
• Military Records
• Diplomas, Yearbooks, Diaries, Letters, Scrapbooks
• Photos
• Obituaries

The library offers customers a suite of EBSCOhost databases for free.  These include, specifically:

• Genealogy: Ancestry Library Edition*, Heritage Hub, Fold3 (military records), & Family Search.
• News & Newspapers: The New York Times, The Kansas City Star, Gale OneFile: News, and Newspapers.com.

* In library use only

It's best to gather all of the materials you can find and then organize them based on your purposes.  For instance, if you're documenting a great uncle, you might save a picture of him plus his entry in the family Bible.  You might also have a mention of him in someone's journal entry that you can attach to him.

• If your ancestor is deceased, most vital records can be found online, but if they are still living, you'd need to request a physical copy of their birth/marriage certificates from the Office of Vital Statistics.  
• If the relative has passed away, you can always review their obituaries to find information such as direct relatives, descendants, place of death, often the place of birth and birth date.
• The Topeka Room can also help you find birth, marriage, and death announcements online and on microfilm.

We do!  The Topeka Room has physical city directories from 1870.  We have digital as well as physical census resources, and we provide access to military records.  (Please note that current or contemporary conflict records or records for living soldiers is often still classified and not available, even under FOIA requests.)

• We can always help you do an Interlibrary Loan if the title you need is only available from another library.  
• We can also help you cross-reference information between sources and find alternate records with similar information.

The Topeka Room has international immigration and naturalization resources, in both physical as well as digital form.  Genealogy resources are updated on an ongoing basis, so new information is always being added, but we have access to passenger lists, registries and rolls, and slave ship manifests.

• As the Topeka Room is a Genealogy Hub, we specialize in helping researchers break through their brick walls.  A good place to start is the Local History and Genealogy Tutorials--an ever-growing library of tutorials and niche learning modules that can be viewed at any time and from any location.
• Customers can schedule an appointment with the Genealogy Librarian at any time.

This is one of the most fun (but also the most difficult) parts of Genealogy!  Most often, conflicting information is an accident.  There might be inaccurate census data, misspelled names, wrong ages, and even inaccurate paternity, but there are nearly always other kinds of documents and DNA that we can help you find to get to the truth.

• The Topeka Room is unique in that it is a full research suite.  We have special collections of books and archives from around the world and local collections materials as well.
• Topeka City Directories, Yearbooks, Plat Maps, Sanborn Maps, Topeka Building Permits, Cemetery Records, and Newspapers can be found here.

Absolutely!  TSCPL works closely with other local initiatives from such places as: 

• Kansas Museum of History
• Topeka Genealogical Society
• Kansas Historical Society

We provide information on the best tests and are happy to take a look at your results with you and help you determine what they can tell you and what they can't.

We have databases  you can use free with your library card.  We have resources from all over the world. We can help you research specific ethnicities, cultures and migration routes.

The Topeka Room houses multiple resources including the Dawes Rolls, which will help you trace your ancestry to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole tribes. We also have physical and online resources specific to ethnic ancestry.

We can help you get started researching yourself and your family tree.  Based on the research and any ephemera you have, we can help you find answers. 

We specialize in research and it's our job to be familiar with these tools. Let us teach you how to read and interpret them.

Yes and we'll help you find accurate information about your family history.

Always document any book, website, index, ephemera, interview, journal or other piece of material. This will help you prove your story and it will keep you from having to research twice if you forgot where you found something critical.