Women's History Month 2021: Museum Databases

Databases. They are a frequent resource for family historians. Hosted on free and subscription websites they allow us to find mentions of our ancestors.

It’s easy to get stuck in the rut of only searching online genealogy databases. But there is so much more available than the old tried and true. 

Museums have databases. They actually have different types of databases. They have databases via the websites they subscribe too which I discussed earlier this month. But they also have databases that reflect their collections. Those databases can be of benefit to researchers, especially when it’s available online.

I gave an example of a museum-created database when I spotlighted the San Bernardino County Museum and their Agua Mansa Cemetery burials database on the post Why Museums? That example spotlighted family history information they have gathered on a historical site they are the stewards of. The following are a few more database examples of what you can find on museum websites. 

The Smithsonian

One of the first museum databases I stumbled upon was from the Smithsonian. One of my research projects involves a little-known 19th-century female artist. Although none of her paintings are at the  Smithsonian, they do have a folder of information about her that I stumbled upon by searching the generic-sounding Art and Artists Files. The file included newspaper articles and titles of her paintings.

The Huntington

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens’ Early California Population Project  is a database of baptisms, marriage and, burial records from California missions. While this is a private library with reader restrictions they do have some collections online.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The United States Holocaust Survivors and Victims database from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum includes 60% of what is available from the Museum. “The database contains millions of names of individuals persecuted under the Nazi regime. If a name is linked to a document, you can submit a request to have the document e-mailed to you.” Other names can be searched at the museum. One of the collections in this database is the Jewish Women Liberated In The Camp Bergen-Belsen.

The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts

The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts website has an Object Database Search that “contains descriptions, data, and approximately 100,000 photographs of nearly 20,000 objects—in both private and public collections—that were made in the early American South." Here’s an example from one of the 208 search results for  the keyword “sampler.” 

Museum databases span everything from a catalog of their images, to images of their collections, to indexed information. The information can be personal (name, date, place) or consist of things and events. Museum databases can provide you a place to search for a specific ancestor or learn more about their social history. Don’t forget to seek out the museum where your ancestor lived and more prominent museums that document a community.

Tomorrow we will explore another resource at the museum, a museum’s library. See you tomorrow!